This just in: I dropped a half-gallon pitcher of orange juice on the floor this morning. Did the lid come off, allowing all 64 ounces to go all over the goddamn place? Do you even need to ask?

In a sign my luck may be changing, however, Alan was there to help me clean up, and I had a back-up in the fridge. For those of you keeping track at home.

OK, then.

When I was a Hoosier, two of my favorite people in town were Jerry and Linda Vanderveer, who ran an architectural salvage business on the unglamorous south side. If an old house was slated for demolition, they’d go in, strip everything that could be carried away and take it back to the Wood Shack, corner of Baker and Fairfield. If you were restoring a house and wanted some 1912-era vent covers, or pocket doors, or crystal doorknobs or whatever, you went to see them. Their place didn’t look big from the outside and was claustrophobic within, but it had its own kind of order. Doors were in one room, moldings in another, eight or nine fireplace mantels leaning up against a wall in various states of repair/restoration.

A business like that depends on a certain amount of ongoing demolition, and like most rust-belt cities, the Fort had its share. But when you’re talking about vacant old houses waiting to be torn down, Detroit is Mecca. And where Jerry and Linda were one of only a few, if not the only ones, doing the job in Fort Wayne, here there are dozens.

I stopped in at one of these places in Royal Oak last year, run by a woman with more artistic sensibilities. She not only stripped the stuff, she restored it, recombined it with other pieces and did a brisk business making a lot of cottages up north look very shabby-chic. But considering the abandoned-building business here includes not only houses but architectural masterpieces from the glory days, I really shouldn’t be surprised by some of the stuff that turns up. And yet, I always am.

DetNews columnist Neal Rubin offers an atypical, but by no means unheard-of example today: What am I bid for a pair of solid bronze, 9-and-a-half-foot doors once used on a bank vault and designed by architectural legend Albert Kahn? They’re in good shape, considering they spent the last half-century in some guy’s garage. They now reside in Toledo, where a salvage expert took them after retrieving them from the garage, but they’re still underutilized. She wants $38,000 for them, pocket change for the sort of hedge-fund plutocrat who’d go for such a thing. Shipping is steep — $1,000 — but likely less than what UPS would charge you to move 1,200 pounds of bronze from Toledo to your front house.

This is like when the peasants lopped the heads off the statues on the Notre Dame cathedral during the French revolution, and they found them in some guy’s basement a couple hundred years later. Sorta.

Are you in a Friday mood? I’m in a Friday mood. So take 9 minutes, 28 seconds and enjoy this clipfest of 100 movies, 100 quotes, 100 numbers. Once you get the idea, see if you can anticipate the big ones. The only ones I predicted accurately were 50 and 44 (big clue in the freeze frame below). “Ben-Hur” fans will be at an advantage in the 40s, too:

Are you having fun? Good. Because I have to get some work done. Enjoy.

One of the more amusing widgets on my new desktop is one that tells me if Mercury is retrograde at any given moment. I believe in astrology about as much as I believe in the leadership capabilities of George W. Bush, but I do believe in easy, stupid explanations for a run of bad luck, and “Mercury is retrograde” works as well as any. (For a time, my friend Mark the Shark started blaming everything that happened in his life on El Niño. This worked well, as it fit in with what everyone else in the world was doing, at least as reflected in the newspapers, where everything from a plague of leopard slugs to a bad losing streak was credited to El Niño.)

After this last couple days of pratfalls, screwups, bad weather and hit-and-run drivers, I need an explanation. I went to the grocery store yesterday and discovered I’d left my wallet at home, having removed it to file my insurance report. I went home and walked the dog. Nothing like walking the dog to settle the old nerves. The leash broke. I drove Kate to school this morning because it was unpleasantly chilly, and the remains of my taillight fell out in the middle of Mack Avenue.

Went home and checked the widget. “Mercury OK,” it said.

Here’s a nice explanation of how retrograde motion happens, if you’re interested.

A nice interlude at the state police post yesterday, sitting in their sterile little waiting area, where there’s nothing to read but pamphlets, but the TV is tuned to the History Channel. I caught the end of a show on Old Las Vegas. In the usual fashion, they kept the titillation for the end, with a discussion of the early topless shows and prostitution on the Strip. Cut to the Las Vegas sheriff, who said with a straight face, “There still may be some prostitution in Vegas, but no more than anywhere else.” I looked around to see if the troopers behind the counter were as wide-eyed with astonishment as I was. They remained intent on their computer screens; it’s just background noise to them.

One of the cops was wearing shades, indoors on a cloudy day. I thought he was just rockin’ the macho cop look, but no — he’d recently had Lasik surgery, and the lights were bothering him. We discussed the pros and cons of this elective procedure, and he said some departments — not his — were making Lasik available free to all working officers. A cop without specs is not fogging his lenses at critical moments, and the prices are now low enough to make it cheaper, over time, than a new pair of $300 glasses every couple years. So far, in Michigan, this enviable health benefit was only available free of charge to — wait for it — state legislators. At least that’s what he said; I have no idea if it’s true, but if so it’s funny, since the distinguished gentlefolk in Lansing are currently displaying extreme myopia, and need all the vision correction they can get.

My first encounter with the Michigan state police came as a teenager in the U.P., where they’re known as “the state boys,” and the less said about that encounter the better. They still drive blue cruisers with a single gumball-machine light on top — none of those pussy high-tech light bars for the state boys. The other day I passed one who had a car pulled over on I-75, three adult men inside, and arrayed on the car’s rooftop — a 40-oz. bottle half-filled with beer and two tall-boy cans of same. The men inside looked glum; the party was over. The state boy sat in the cruiser writing on a clipboard. They say anesthesiology is hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror. A cop’s life is 40 percent drunks and 60 percent paperwork.

Do you watch “COPS”? I don’t, but I know men who use it for father-son bonding purposes. Every so often it’s good for a laugh; I’m always amazed at the power of television demonstrated by how many of these Cletuses sign the release to be on TV. I’d think one of the great tensions in a police officer’s life would be the daily confrontation with life’s injustice and ambiguity, seeing how poverty and degradation can thwart even the strongest will, the same way money and privilege can buoy the most clueless morons. Maybe this is why cop-speak tends to be hyper-specific, a place where men and women are males and females, cars are vehicles and booze is intoxicants. The local weekly reports the police business in the language on the report, and so when drunks are pulled out of their cars for sobriety tests, it’s always due to “the strong odor of intoxicants coming from the driver’s facial area.”

Does this entry have a point? It doesn’t appear to, although there’s the strong odor of ass coming from its facial area, so let’s just skip to the bloggage and me to the shower.

Mean Christopher Hitchens on the newly departed reverend: One of (Falwell’s) associates, Bailey Smith, once opined that “God does not hear the prayers of a Jew.” This is one of the few anti-Semitic remarks ever made that has a basis in fact, since God does not exist and does not attend to any prayers, but Smith was not quite making that point. Harsh!

Via Metafilter: Runners tend toward teh crazy. Here’s evidence.

Google Analytics provides evidence that while it may not pay to pick on people more popular than yourself, it does do wonders for one’s traffic:

Another day, another stop at the body shop. Sorry for excessive lameness today; I’m preoccupied.

I should have known it would be a lousy night. The proverbial strong line of thunderstorms blew through the area late in the afternoon. When I showed up for my writing workshop at Wayne State, I was one of two (2) to do so. And it wasn’t a very productive session, either, even with a vastly improved student-teacher ratio.

I got disoriented leaving the library — why are college campuses laid out so oddly? I ask you — and had to walk halfway around a long city block, in the driving rain, to find my car.

And then it was out onto I-94 for the chariot race home, only things were moving slower because of the rain. But it was moving, and then the taillights up ahead started winking red for something involving police lights. This being Detroit, it could have been anything from a flooded dip in the road to a rabid pit bull firing a machine gun. I was slowing down in the center lane when the person behind me on the right did the quintessential D-town freeway move — the multiple-lane high-speed cutover in heavy traffic. I felt the crunch as s/he clipped my left taillight.

And watched as the offender sped off into the twilight.

I scanned my options for a moment and considered the correct one was probably the most ridiculous: Pull over, stop, call 911 and await further instructions for a no-injury, minor-damage accident during a howling thunderstorm. Or I could get proactive. Reader, an air bag of inspiration deployed; I gave chase.

Hit me and take off, will you? Well, we shall see about that! The vehicle, a pickup, was easy to track — DODGE in big white letters on a black tailgate. I gained on it, dropped in behind, flashed my brights in search of the plate number. At which point the driver felt an urgent need to exit, which fit my purposes perfectly; I could catch up the way a yellow flag bunches up a Nascar field. I got the license plate, scrawled it on my writing-workshop folder, and what’s this? S/he’s pulling over? Excellent. I pulled over behind the truck. As soon as we were both stopped, the driver laid rubber going away. I followed for a few more blocks of amateurish left-right-left-right shenanigans, then stopped and called 911. I didn’t need to get lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood at night. The man at the state police post was very nice. I have to go down today and file a report, at which point the system will yawn in my face. As much as I might hope for a CSI-style investigation, complete with flyovers with infrared scopes and Marg Helgenberger gathering paint chips from my bumper, this is a no-fault insurance state. No injuries, no complications, sign here and here and here and pay the $500 deductible.

So that was my night. How was yours?

It got me thinking later, when the blood had settled a bit. The last time I was in an accident serious enough to get insurance adjusters involved was nearly 20 years ago. I was sitting at a light at Creighton and Fairfield in lovely south-side Fort Wayne, Indiana when I looked up to see a driverless car leaving the gas station, approaching my passenger door at a 90-degree angle. It hit me hard enough to push me into the next lane. I got out and walked over to the car. Sitting behind the wheel was a smiling, gurgling, apparently unharmed boy of about 2. His father had left him unrestrained in a running car while he went inside to buy cigarettes or something. Guess what he said when he came out to discover his son had had his first fender-bender before he was toilet-trained.

“I told him not to touch nothin’.”

Well, at least I have amusing accidents.

Moving on, then. I see Brian got a little miffed at the “grave-dancing” in yesterday’s comments, over the late Rev. Fartwell. No less a pinko than Roy opted out as well. Fine, it’s a defensible choice. When someone dies, it zeroes the scales, or at least reduces them by 21 grams. Don’t speak ill of the dead, etc. At the same time, though, we have to give a dead man his due. I really don’t have an ax to grind with the guy — he existed in the realm of Ann Coulter for me — so I started thinking back, as dispassionately as I could, on the Rev’s public statements, trying to recall if, even once, he tried to be taken seriously, if he ever brought anything to the discussion to indicate he wanted to play fair in the fields of policy debate.

And I couldn’t think of anything. Tim Noah at Slate gives us the highlights. And let’s not forget his role in the Clinton Chronicles. I won’t say “good riddance,” but I will say: I won’t miss him. Oh, and thanks to Kirk for finding this YouTube clip from the breaking-news cycle that shows, as if you needed to see it again, how credulous too many journalists can be.

The iPod threw out a gem on yesterday’s bike ride — “It’s Madison Time,” by the Ray Bryant Combo. It’s the most complicated dance record in history, I think: Now when I say hit it, I want you to go two up and two back, double cross and come out of it with the rifleman. Later verses call for a “Cleveland box,” “Jackie Gleason” and a “basketball, with a Wilt Chamberlain hook.” What-ever. I first heard the song in “Hairspray,” original recipe. I figured it, like so much in that movie, was an obscure Baltimore reference, and thought of asking Ms. Lippman about it. Asked Google instead, and I’m so glad I did. Because it turns out the Madison started in…Columbus, according to William “Bubbles” Holloway, anyhow. (Warning: Really obnoxious embedded sound.) The scanned newspaper clip on that page shows a sharp-looking line of black folks doing the Madison at “the LVA Club on E. Long St.” Get out!

Let’s bring the bloggage full circle, back to Detroit, as we wrap up with Detroitblog’s report from the Cinco de Mayo parade:

The Freep mentioned the parade on its front page the day before, so I expected an influx of newcomers eager for a glimpse of the city outside the usual downtown radius most people think of as “Detroit.” Instead there was a mere handful, consisting either of pale hipsters exposing their pasty flanks to the climbing sun, or several odd academic types in their 50s, complete with standard professorial attire like a tweed jacket (seriously), whose confused demeanor suggested they came to observe this mysterious and heretofore unfamiliar phenomenon called Local Mexican People, who constitute nearly the entire population of this area.

The prof types near us looked slightly disappointed or bewildered as the parade plowed forward, as if they expected to see perhaps a solemn procession paying tribute to ancient Mayan roots, or marchers carrying effigies representing genocidal conquistadors imposing an alien culture on meek native peoples, the kind of scene that brings a flutter to the modern academic heart.

Instead they got chihuahuas, Virgin Mary tapestries, low-cut shirts, pit bulls pulling children in wagons, child boxers, tortillas handed out from floats, and hot rods galore, painted in varying levels of gaudiness and beauty. Their facial expressions suggested that they were seeing brazenly and merrily paraded before them the same supposed stereotypes they’ve likely lectured their students to avoid assuming.

But every ethnic parade is a host of stereotypes, or cultural icons, depending on your point of view. One person’s stereotype is another person’s “screw you, I actually do like hot rods.”

Me, too. Off to do battle with the insurance industry.

Some people got to discussing grace — as in “the prayer before eating,” not “the love of God” or “elegance of movement” — in the comments yesterday. It reminded me of one of the pitfalls of not raising our child in any religion, i.e. she can’t say grace when called upon. On the summer to-do list: Teach her one or two.

At camp with the girl scouts a couple weeks ago, we were asked to “take an attitude of respect” for a short blessing before every meal. A different troop was called forward to lead us each time, and some smartass Brownies called for the Addams family grace:

Na na na nah (snap fingers twice)
Na na na nah (snap fingers twice)
Na na na nah (sing three times then snap fingers twice)

We thank the Lord for giving
The food we need for living
Because we really need it
And we like it too!

Note to self: Not that one.

We said a grace in our house, on holidays and special occasions only, that I have come to think of as “Catholic grace:” BlessusohLordandthesethygiftswhichweareabouttoreceive
throughChristourLordamen, and a lunge for the mashed potatoes. Grace is frequently said at breakneck speed in Catholic families, because families tend to be large and if you don’t move fast, you go hungry. In Alan’s Methodist family, they say Protestant grace: Come Lord Jesus, be our guest and let these gifts to us be blessed. Amen. I know it’s Protestant because I later found it cross-stitched onto a set of placemats made for our family by my mother’s Lutheran aunt. Anyway, no one makes the sign of the cross first. It always bugged me because it rhymes. Prayers shouldn’t rhyme. (Google attributes it to Martin Luther, the famous rhyming heretic, but that sounds like a crock. What’s the German version?)

Even though I was raised Catholic in a WASP-y neighborhood, I really didn’t experience the untracked territories of grace until I started eating with my best friend Becky’s family. Her father was a United Church of Christ minister and her mother was southern, which meant a certain hybrid style — a prayer in which hands weren’t folded in front of us but joined around the table. I’m not a hand-holder under any circumstances. Remember Larry David in the prayer circle on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” trying to get away with no more than a fingertip of human contact? That’s me. But her mother was a great cook, and it seemed a small sacrifice to make in the name of being a good guest.

And then the Jesus Revolution came to our little suburb, and all of a sudden we were into the free-form prayer, to which there’s only one reaction: God help us all.

One night, in the very earliest days of the televangelist era, I was asked to stay for dinner at my friend Jeff’s house. Jeff was heavily into the then-unknown Jim and Tammy Bakker, particularly Tammy. (Of course Jeff was gay; do you even need to ask?) We would talk to one another in Appalachian accents for long stretches, asking one another to cast out the demons of multiple sclerosis from a lady in Iowa who was holding her hands on the TV in hopes of a cure. So we sat down at the table, and Jeff’s mother said, “Did I forget anything?” and I said, in my best southeast Ohio hillbilly twang, “Nope. All we gotta do now is thank the Lord.” As soon as my tongue touched my palate to form the L sound, I remember that Jeff’s father had recently become a born-again Christian, and was inclined to be a real pain in the ass about it. Too late!

“Yes, let’s,” he said, smiling beatifically, reaching for the hands on either side of him. And he commenced to make a long, long, long extemporaneous prayer, asking that not only the food and the company be blessed, but that God protect Scott (another son) on the long cross-country journey he was preparing to make, and thanks for the lovely weather, and have we mentioned how happy we are to all be together around the table and —

This was too much for me. Jeff’s hand, holding mine, was crushing it with the effort of not laughing, but I was defeated and started snorting, high up in my sinuses. Would he never get to the goddamn amen? My eyes filled with tears; I’m sure my face was purple. By the time it was over, I had to throw down my napkin and rush to the bathroom to shriek into the towels, which sort of spoiled the mood. It remains the single most mortifying social faux pas of my life, and queered me on non-denominational Christianity once and for all.

My parents’ ashes are interred in the same cemetery where Jeff is buried. He’s just two doors down from Woody Hayes, so his family plot was easy to find. The last time I was there, I saw his father’s name had been added to the stone. I’m not much of a knee-bender, but I stood for a moment and threw out some silent vibes of apology.

So, bloggage? Yes, bloggage:

It’s customary to refer to the local constabulary as “(name of city)’s Finest,” but I bet they don’t say that in Dearborn, not anymore. A cop lifts some pot off a suspect, takes it home to make brownies, eats the whole batch and then bitches out on the maryjane rollercoaster. The 911 call, embedded in the page, will make you feel 17 again. Make sure to stick around until he asks the score of the Red Wings game.

From the Why Didn’t I Go to B-School file: Pasadena website outsources city council coverage — to India.

The weekend, it’s here! Have a good one.

I don’t know if there’s a way to search how many times I use words ending in “ly,” but I’m taking a vow today: No more adverbs. OK, fewer adverbs. OK, just no more of the bad ones.

Which are? The ones that appear in newspapers these days. The big three chapping my ass at the moment are “deeply religious,” “wept openly” and my current bete noire, “visibly shaken.”

There was an upset in the mayoral primary in Fort Wayne Tuesday. A reporter describes the scene at GOP headquarters:

Peters, who had the backing of the majority of Republican elected officials, left Republican headquarters on Main Street visibly shaken. “You don’t embark on a process like this without feeling you’ll prevail,” he said.

The first sentence writes the check; the quote bounces it. The candidate in question is a veteran pol and corporate HR executive, something of a career bureaucrat, and I bet the last time he was visibly shaken was when the Hurryin’ Hoosiers were upset at Assembly Hall. Yes, he was the favorite, but “visibly shaken,” to me, means he was pale, trembling, confused, teary, whatever. And if he was, then say so, dammit.

“Wept openly” — there’s another one. I suppose it’s possible to hide one’s weeping, behind your hands or in a bathroom somewhere, but if you’re in a position where you’re visible to others, your weeping is pretty open. You’re not fooling anyone with that “I must have something in my eye” trick, you know. “Wept unashamed” is better, if you have to point it out. (I had an editor once, Richard the Fabulous, who had the most deadpan sense of humor on the planet. He liked to say, “I wept openly” in describing some cheesy movie he’d just seen; it was code for “boy, did that suck.”)

“Deeply religious” — we all know what that means. Crazy religious.

I’m not the first one to say this; see Roy Peter Clark and Chip Scanlan on the same subject, both from Poynter.

Oy. It’s been a week, hasn’t it? I feel as though all I’ve done is rattle keys and approve comments. Thanks to all who stopped by, but if I’m going to make a living I can’t sustain this pace. Deadlines are callin’ and today I sign a contract for my summer project — text for a coffee-table book. Why Nance, you’re asking. Doesn’t that boil down to “cutlines?” No, it doesn’t. But it doesn’t add up to a 90,000-word manuscript, either. More like 20K, for a book with a nice history theme, which means lots of library research, old photos, microfilm and, because this is a Detroit project, deep sighing. It’s impossible to look at What Was in this city without mourning What It All Came To. I can be fairly dispassionate about the way societies change — the wheels turn, etc. — but “no regrets” isn’t really in my DNA, either. I’m not a Detroit defeatist; the city remains, even in its ruin, endlessly interesting and worth sticking around to see what comes next. But it was once something so grand, and you have to give that a moment of silence, too.

More on this project as it gels.

Do we have bloggage today? We do.

Just another day in the D:

One night last week, someone firebombed an abandoned house on Caldwell Street in northeast Detroit that was 4 feet from a home occupied by 22-year-old Adrian Griffin, a small, taut woman who awoke in a bedroom radiating heat like an oven.

When she opened her eyes, she saw flames from next door licking through a cracked window. She jumped out of bed and rousted her younger brother and sister. They escaped and stood on the sidewalk, watching the flames consume their home.

As she stood there, Griffin said, she thought to herself: “Is that fire engine smoking?” Yes, that was smoke. It was pouring out of the motor of the principal pumper engine on the scene, and it eventually forced the firefighters to shut down the pumper and rely on other equipment.

You live next door to an abandoned house, which is then firebombed by an arsonist, which sets your own house on fire, and the fire fighters arrive, and the pumper breaks down. Someone once told me that “living on the south side of Fort Wayne is a political act,” probably with an index finger raised in the air. But let it be said: Living on the south side of Fort Wayne is to living in Detroit what watching “Black Hawk Down” is to actually fighting on the streets of Mogadishu.

Meanwhile, Golden Wheel honoree Ron hits another one out of the park with his explication of how Michigan teachers will end up bankrupting us all. OK, a bit of overstatement, but not much. Probably not for non-Mitten residents, but for all interested in how these things get out of hand.

That’s it for me. On to the gym; my knee’s finally up for more abuse.

Every day this week, my neighborhood roars from morning to late afternoon with the sounds of power tools. Mowers, edgers, blowers, whiffers, whaffers, that thing-that-digs-up-your-lawn-and-makes-it-look-like-geese-crapped-all-over-it, but is somehow good for it. (Oh yeah, an aerator.) My neighbors will be doing their second mow of the season this weekend. We have yet to do our first.

It’s not that we don’t care about our lawn. We do. We just don’t care that much. Once again, we’ve found ourselves out of step with our neighbors.

For much of my life, I found myself living near at least one person who objected to lawn care as bourgeois bullshit. You know the type: Obsession with a weed-free patch of grass in front of one’s house is the ultimate distraction from the stuff in life that really matters, and so they opt out. That “the stuff that really matters” tends to be “sitting in front of the TV watching basketball” is only evidence of their superior sensibilities. And so they let their lawn grow long and shaggy, and sometimes they glance out the front window and say, “Thank God I’m a Libertarian, and above all this shit.”

To these people I have but one thing to say: Move to Mongo. (Mongo is a small town in northern Indiana, but in this usage it’s more representative of that outback town where civilization is always kept at bay. In the 1980s and ’90s, when the city of Fort Wayne was aggressively annexing its urbanized, unincorporated neighborhoods, a knot of whiny individualists could always be counted on to write tiresome letters to the editor about the changing city-limits sign. These missives always contained some version of the line, “But Marge and I moved here five years ago to get away from the city,” as though buying a three-bedroom house in a subdivision where volunteer soybeans still occasionally sprout in the back yard, close enough to the city limits to lengthen one’s commute by no more than eight minutes, gave one an eternal claim to some sort of “country” life. A colleague and I came up with “Move to Mongo” as a way to say, “If you really want to get away from it all, then get away from it all. And stop complaining”)

In matters of the lawn, as in so many things, I’m a committed moderate. You will never catch me out there fretting over crabgrass and dandelions, but I accept that I live in a neighborhood, and neighborhoods only look as good as their crummiest property, and I promise not to be that property. I will never be the nicest one, either, but I’ll do my part.

Here in the GP, we find ourselves falling closer to the libertarian end of the spectrum. People here tend their landscaping with the tender loving care of a pothead with hydroponics. Some people here simply live to putter in the yard. Most of our neighbors have automatic sprinkler systems, which go on at 5 a.m. with a loud, sibilant hiss, awakening certain late-staying-up journalists in the neighborhood, not that I am complaining. But it’s damn hard to keep up with these folks, so I don’t try. “Maintenance-free landscaping” — there’s a Realtor’s phrase to steal my heart. We’ll have to get the mower out this weekend at the very latest, or risk becoming Those People. We’ll hold up our end, keeping up, if not with the Joneses, than certainly the Smiths.

Whew. This week has been less-than-good, but at least I now have new prescription bottles littering the coffee table. I’m asking Kate to “bring Mommy her medication” so that she’ll have lots of good stories to tell her therapist. As soon as I can teach her to mix a daiquiri, she’ll be well on her way.

So, bloggage:

When it comes to colorful, you really can’t beat a colorful lawyer. The DC Madam’s mouthpiece is a case in point:

You do a computerized database news search for Sibley, and what you get is information on his representation of Arthur Vanmoor, better known as the aforementioned “Big Pimping Pappy.”

BPP ran an escort service in Fort Lauderdale a few years back. He got busted and deported (he’s Dutch), then sued his clients for having sex with his employees. Sibley was his attorney.

It was the same tactic Sibley is using now to advise Palfrey: The manager of BPP’s escort service was merely providing “quality time with a quality woman,” Sibley told MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson in an on-camera interview in March 2006. Customers had to sign a receipt saying they wouldn’t engage in illegal sexual activity. If they did, then they broke the law.

Sibley sued them for breach of contract.

Let’s go to the videotape:

Carlson: “You sound like you look down on these men. That they would somehow get the idea that just because you call an escort service . . . and have a girl in a tube top and a vinyl skirt come over to your hotel room — that somehow they got the idea sex was involved. You sound like you’re unimpressed with their judgment.”

Sibley: “Well, Tucker, is that what the girls look like that come to your hotel room?”

Carlson: “I don’t have girls come to my hotel room who I’m not married to.”

I don’t know about you, but when I saw that Joan Baez was getting some ink earlier this week, claiming military officials refused to let her perform for the troops, I had a few questions, including:

1) Joan Baez is still performing?
2) Someone wants her to perform for them?
3) People young enough to be soldiers? Come on.

Well, it’s more complicated than that. The invitation was extended by famous Hoosier grump John Melly-mel Cougar Mellencamp, to “play with him,” suggesting a role shaking a tambourine and singing backup on “Small Town,” not crooning “Joe Hill” in her own soprano warble. Whew. I was fearing a comeback tour.

Have a great weekend. Back, and feeling better I hope, next week.

The pain situation has escalated. Mrs. R. Knee has now been heard from. Yesterday I found myself longing for a cane, and cursing the one truth of being female: The body you hated yesterday will be the one you long for today. When you’re younger, you think, “Remember four years ago, when I thought I was so fat? I wish I was that skinny now.” And then you get older, and you think, “Remember four days ago, when I was merely sore? I wish I was sore now, instead of crippled, too.”

The doctor has been called. I’ll spare you more details.

Well, this: While I was recuperating yesterday, I found the most awesome bra store online. I usually buy my chest hammocks from Harp’s in Birmingham, which along Town Shop in New York City may be the two greatest bra stores on the planet. Amusingly, both stores share a secret weapon: A tiny Jewish lady behind the counter who has seen every boob shape under the sun and can tell your size through a winter coat with 99 percent accuracy. Excuse me, make that “shared.” The New York Times has a way with obits:

Selma Koch, a Manhattan store owner who earned a national reputation by helping women find the right bra size, mostly through a discerning glance and never with a tape measure, died Thursday at Mount Sinai Medical Center. She was 95 and a 34B.

Mrs. Harp is also in her 10th decade, and still works most days. The last time I interviewed her, I asked if she was passing the store along to her heirs. She said “none of my grandchildren want to work as hard as Nana.”

In this economy, I’m not taking my business elsewhere. But I like the customer comments on the website, where I note that nearly every woman refers to her breasts as “the girls” or “the twins.” Taken along with Kramer’s famous line about tighty whities — “My boys need a house!” — this would seem to be a universal preference. The closest I ever came to giving my own a separate identity was when I was nursing a newborn, and they were so stripped of eroticism that one day I nearly answered the door with my shirt open to the waist. That would have given the UPS man a jolt, I’d say, although to me, they were just another couple of hard-workin’ body parts. Like my feet.

OK, now that I’ve, uh, lowered the tone, let’s see if we can’t wallow around down here for a while.

This is why I hardly ever read science fiction. Slate unpacks Mitt Romney’s fondness for “Battlefield Earth,” L. Ron Hubbard’s, er, novel:

For those of you who didn’t study it in school, “Battlefield Earth” takes place in the year 3000, when the human race is nearly extinct and the planet stripped of its natural resources. Mankind has been enslaved by evil aliens with very bad breath that explodes when it comes into contact with radioactive material. A young slave wielding lasers and draped in a tennis cardigan leads a rebellion and retakes Earth, only to be attacked again by a series of foes including a race of interstellar bankers trying to collect on bad debts. (There may be kung-fu fights and a championship football game, too; I confess that I haven’t read it all.)

Remember that Jon Carroll column on miracles? Here’s the 20 Most Amazing Coincidences, including the James Dean car curse. In doesn’t include one I heard about many years ago, when a photography magazine ran a famous tabloid photo of a man being carried into an ER with what appears to be a telephone pole driven through the center of his chest. The man was awake and calm, and the story was that the pole somehow shoved all his vital organs aside on its trip into his viscera, sparing his life. He spent months in a hospital recovering, only to be released and, just a few weeks later, swept off a jetty on Long Island by a freakishly large wave, never to be seen again. A superstitious person might say the devil had come to collect one way or another, but I say: Life is strange.

Shower-bound, I am. Don’t spend too much time with the boob pictures, guys.

Last night I was coming downstairs after doing my nightly tuck-in duty when my foot, in a sock, slipped out from under me and I fell, in solid and spectacular fashion, directly on my butt. Even my cushiony bum couldn’t handle a load like the rest of me. Turned 180 degrees and relocated to a wrestling ring, the move would be called the piledriver. As it was, I counted myself victorious because I merely howled amorphous sounds of pain, not the stream of obscenities that bubbled to my lips.

Long story short: I’m flat on my back in bed, and I plan to stay here for a few hours. If you care to, answer my plea today: Ice, heat or Vicodin? (I’m making do with Tylenol.)

A wee bit of bloggage to bring a smile to your lips; I know it did to mine, even twisted as they are in pure, pure agony: Ken Levine’s Idol recap. A sample:

For his part, I thought Jon Bon Jovi gave the best advice all season, even better than Diana Ross advising the kids to start getting face work done now.

Argh, where are my drugs?!

Well, it finally happened. A moment of silence, please, for my old PowerBook, now pushing up daisies on my desk, just about as dead as dead can be. I was happily pecking away, leaving a comment for Lance Mannion, when the cursor froze and, metaphorically speaking, it dropped to the floor clutching its chest. It may still be possible to resuscitate it — and I plan to try, because you always need a few more old computers lying around the house — but it certainly isn’t possible to do my work on the thing, and so I went over the river and through the woods to the Apple store on Saturday.

The PowerBook is dead, long live the MacBook. It has a built-in camera:

With special effects, I hasten to add.

Oh, well. Any fatal error has a good news/bad news component. Good news: It didn’t happen during tax preparation. Bad news: I hadn’t backed up for a while, so some stuff is just lost, at least until I can recover it, which may be a while.

All this by way of saying posting may be light for a few days, as I figure out a few things, including where the hell my copy of MS Word is, because I can’t find it anywhere. It’s not like a writer needs MS Word, oh no. I can pull it off the last backup, but I’d like a clean reinstall.

Anyone feel like hitting me for a video chat, do so. And no, I will not take off my shirt.

While we’re on the bummer theme, let’s get this out of the way: Saw United 93 the other night, and watched the credits roll with mixed feelings. The simple truth is: This is a beautifully written and shot movie about an almost unbearably painful event absolutely no one wants to see. I was enormously impressed, and I never want to see it again.

But I’m glad this movie is out there, and that it sets a few bars, including the most important one: We really don’t know what happened up there. We know some things, but they’re just flash frames; the whole movie went down with the plane, along with anyone who saw it. It was easy to fear, in the anguished, crazy time after 9/11, that the first films made about the tragedy would have highly partisan narratives that would push one version of events over another. “United 93” doesn’t do that. No one stands up and says, “Let’s roll!” and leads the group to a gallant death. It looks, in its no-recognizable-actors way, very much like news footage.

And, if you’ve ever been through a remarkable event, it has the feel of truth. The passengers never act like Bruce Willis in the “Die Hard” movies; they look about to piss themselves from fright, even when they’re being as brave as people can be. And in the last minutes, when the cockpit door has been battered down and the final struggle is taking place, no one man or woman steps forward to be the hero — all we see are a dozen different hands, all straining to get to the controls, before the camera turns to see the view from the windshield. The world turns upside down, and the ground rushes up to meet everyone. The end.

“I bet you’d have been one of those guys,” I told Alan afterward.

“One never knows,” he said.

No, one doesn’t. Really, one doesn’t. We all like to think we’d be brave, but we don’t know until we know, and by then it’s a little late to argue. Of course, it’s never too late for right-wing morons to star in their own little imaginary movie:

Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn’t anyone rush the guy? It’s not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness’ sake—one of them reportedly a .22.

At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren’t very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can’t hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren’t bad.

Yes, at the very least, “count the shots,” such a natural response when the door to your classroom swings open and a madman walks in, guns blazing. And check out the ballistics report from a guy who hasn’t been any closer to a real firefight than a TV screen. I know I said I wasn’t going to read any of this stuff, but sometimes it just jumps in front of you.

So, to the bloggage:

Jack Shafer’s defense of pushy reporters is good enough, but he had me at this passage:

The gold standard for journalistic insensitivity was established in the 1960s by an unnamed British TV reporter who was trawling for news at a Congo airport. According to foreign correspondent Edward Behr’s 1978 memoir, the Brit walked through the crowd of terrified Belgian colonials who were evacuating, and shouted, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”

I doubt I’ll ever cover breaking news again, but if I do, I’m going to use that line. You know, just for laughs.

Yours truly had another radio essay on the air yesterday, on “Detroit Today,” on WDET, our (what else?) public station. Find it here. Requires QuickTime, etc. The edit isn’t precise, so when it goes to music at about two-thirds through, it’s over. The producer didn’t trim the music; probably too busy. One of these days I’ll get out QT Pro and do a nice fade-out, but for now, bandwidth hog it shall remain.

We had a family discussion/argument about split peas the other day, over, what else, a dinner of split-pea soup — I made the last pot of the season, using up the remnants of the Easter ham and banishing these maddeningly slow-to-exit chilly days. Never mind the specifics of the argument; I will end up looking particularly stupid, and besides, I contend that I never suggested split peas were separated by hard-working immigrants using tiny vises, chisels and hammers, only that the so-called split pea is not a separate species from the green pea found in Green Giant cans and pods in the grocery store.

News flash: It is indeed a different animal. Ahem:

field pea
A variety of yellow or green pea grown specifically for drying. These peas are dried and usually split along a natural seam, in which case they’re called split peas.
Source: epicurious

But as frequently happens to the curious, epi- and otherwise, the research led me down half a dozen paths of delight, including that of Pea Soup Andersen’s, a legendary bit of California kitsch that appears to be the Frankenmuth of the west coast. Anyway, one of these days I’m going to make it out there for a visit, as I love pea soup in all its incarnations. I’m sure LA Mary knows the owner, and can arrange a kitchen tour.

And now, I remind you that split peas are a high-fiber food, and combined with two cups of coffee — whoa, gotta go. Later!