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!

Alex raises a question in the comments of an old thread: If Don Imus had referred to the Rutgers baseball players as lesbians rather than prostitutes, would the outcome today be different? Hmm.

“Nappy-headed dykes,” say, or (more likely) “tattooed dykes.” I don’t wish to be a cynic. But if I think his insult had been seasoned differently, had been about sexual identity — which all good Americans know is entirely a choice, something you pick out in a store like a pair of Levi’s — rather than race, Imus would be interviewing Frank Rich as we speak and we wouldn’t be looking at his Andy Rooney eyebrows in the newspaper today.

Since this topic is now so played it’s like discussing the weather (STILL TOO COLD), maybe we could take it away in that direction. Or maybe you’re as sick of hearing about it as I am.

Me, I went shopping yesterday. Nickel-and-dimed my discretionary spending away on things like foot cream and a misting fountain for Kate’s room (long story boiled short: she loves it). But I counted myself victorious, because I went to the Container Store and only bought two 99-cent plastic squeeze bottles and a marked-down iPod case. As soon as I walked through the doors I knew I was at high risk to produce a credit card and start making sweeping arm motions at entire aisles. The place is like a porn store for women, dangling the fantasy that we all hold in our heads — that somehow, somewhere, with the right filing system and a lot of clear plastic boxes, you can find a place for everything and put everything in its place.

Years ago, my sister bought a SimpleHuman trash can. It cost something like $130, which may strike you as insane (it did me, at the time), but everyone who experiences the marvel of this trash can is entirely sold on its clean design and smooth operation, then goes out and buys one. Yesterday I saw the logical upgrade — a $199 electronic model that raises its lid when you stick your foot in the sensor zone at its base.

No, I didn’t buy it. But I drooled. Afterward I came to my senses, the way a man who 20 minutes ago was thinking, “Hmm, yeah, Jenna Jameson might make a nice life partner for a guy like me” might wake up and say, “Um, maybe not.”

Visual joke: For sale at the checkout of the $199 trash can store? Copies of Real Simple magazine, pitched at the person vexed by owning too much stuff.

OK, we’re back on the road today. No. 1 on today’s to-do list: Find a babysitter. Because guess what snuck up on me? Tonight is Iggy at the Fox in Detroit. If necessary, Kate can sit in the car.

A statement, and then a confession:

I will have nothing to say about the death of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., other than the usual: Ah, that’s bad news. A great loss.

Now, the confession: Because I have never read any of his books.

Yes, yes, I know. Heap derision upon me. I once went out with a guy who was such a fan he made “So it goes” his mantra; it was under his picture in his high-school yearbook. I tried to read “Slaughterhouse Five” once and I dunno, it just didn’t grab me. I should try again. Part of it is genre-phobia — I can count the sci-fi books I’ve read and enjoyed on two hands, maybe one. (I’m also allergic to fantasy. I’ve never gotten past page 50 in “The Hobbit,” never mind the trilogy that followed. Say “one ring to rule them all” and I have no idea what you’re talking about.) The rest is just the sort of educational black hole some people have. Alan used to work with a woman who, in 1990-something, had never heard of Oprah Winfrey. Never. I’m like the film buff who never saw “Taxi Driver.” That’s me and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Yesterday I heard an interview with Sherman Alexie on our way to Columbus. He said “the hero of Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse Five,'” and I thought, in the split-second before he said the rest of the sentence, “Billy Something.”

That’s what I know. I’ll leave the tributes to others. (Lance promises to have something later.) Sorry.

Here we are in the Buckeye State, where it’s warmer than Detroit. Considerably so, although the threat of piles of snow was replaced by a rip-roarin’ hailstorm that blew through last night. BB-size precipitation, however, not the golf ball variety, which can leave your car looking like someone went over it with a ball-peen hammer. I’m grateful it’s merely covered with shmutz from the tree it was parked under.

So, bloggage?

A lead it must have been fun to write:

A drunk airport worker with a half-empty beer in his vehicle and an unopened can in his pocket flipped his deicer rig on a remote airstrip at Metro Airport on Wednesday afternoon, airport officials said.

Without drunks, the newspaper really would be filled with stories of hero Boy Scouts. Here’s to drunks.

And here’s to a day off with family. If you have something to say about Billy Pilgrim’s creator, you know where to do it.

What is this thing called memory? Here’s Kate and me yesterday, in the kitchen. She’s making lunch, I’m making beet salad. Her peanut-butter-spreading isn’t going well, because she’s doing it with one hand. The other is pinching her nose shut, so grossed out is she by the smell of the beets I’m dicing.

“Oh, knock it off, DQ,” I tell her. (DQ is, of course, “drama queen.”) “It’s not like I’m making you eat it.”

“You did once,” she says. I protest. I have never, in my life, succeeded in getting her to take more than one bite of anything she doesn’t like. The tears, the gagging and the generalized histrionics all remind me that meals are supposed to be pleasant, and that one of these days she’ll come around, or else she won’t. Every crazy woman I know is crazy on the subject of food. The world doesn’t need another one. Your mileage may vary, but I know my own kid. This is a battle I choose to sidestep.

“And remember that time you wouldn’t let me go to the Halloween party because I wouldn’t finish my spinach?” she said.

“Finish your spinach? You never even started spinach. You ate it when I fed it to you from a baby-food jar, but once you could feed yourself you never ate spinach.”

“No,” she said. “I ate one bite, and you said I had to eat it all, or else I couldn’t go to the party.”

I have no memory of this. None. Kate has a richly detailed one, involving tears and a sad phone call to another kid who was at the party. (“I couldn’t come because I wouldn’t eat my spinach.”) One of us is full of crap, if not spinach. Who?

I asked if she had another other tales of trauma relating to food. She claims I once took her down to the basement, pulled down her undies and spanked her because she wouldn’t eat her peas. This is plainly false. I remember every time I ever spanked her, if you could call a single open-handed swat to the fanny a spanking. I think it was maybe three times. That’s how many times it took me to learn that a) it doesn’t work; and b) it really does hurt you worse than it hurts them. Timeouts and in-room quarantines were far more effective, and entertaining to us as parents, as when she sat by the furnace vent in her room and wailed, “I will not…be locked in my room…like an ANIMAL!” Alan and I were laughing so hard we feared she could hear us.

She also said I sent her to her room because she wouldn’t eat pancakes. It’s possible. I have a vague memory of having nothing suitable for dinner one night and announcing we were having breakfast instead, with bacon, eggs and pancakes at 7 p.m. She probably objected with the usual right-wing conservatism pre-schoolers bring to all arguments, and I may have sent her to her room for being such a pill.

Beyond that, though, we were miles apart. I pointed out the logical inconsistencies in her recollection. Why would I take her to the basement to spank her? Why would I pull down her undies? Clearly she was confusing some pre-K incident of pee-pee comparison with some other trauma. No, she insisted.

“I remember it as though it were yesterday,” she said, totally serioius. Aha. Obviously a line stolen from a Disney Channel movie. But she really was serious. To her, this happened.

So I started thinking, once again, about this mass of Jell-O we all carry around between our ears, and its amazing ability to fool us into, well, any number of things. What is “the truth” when it comes to me, Kate and our disagreements at the dinner table? A video camera recording these scenes would show one thing, but the video recorders in our brains play back another thing entirely. All three constitute some version of “the truth,” but what is it?

Some years ago I read “A Thousand Acres,” Jane Smiley’s masterful retelling of “King Lear” on an Iowa farm. I have to warn you of an impending spoiler, which seems silly, since the story is based on a 400-year-old play, but the novel plows a little new ground, and posits that the estrangement between the father and his two eldest daughters — but not his youngest — was based on sexual abuse, the memory of which one of the daughters suppressed entirely, until it all comes back to her in a terrible rush. This was a popular belief at the time the novel was written, that something so awful could happen to a person that it could be hidden behind a black curtain in one’s mind, perhaps to lurk forever, perhaps to be revealed in a second-act climax.

It never seemed entirely digestible to me. Altering a memory? Sure. Obscuring a memory? Absolutely. But burying it as though it never happened at all? If no alcohol or drugs were involved, it seemed far-fetched. My friends who are clinical psychologists say it happens all the time, but I’m still skeptical. It just sounded like really shaky science, and a recipe for disaster — people jailed for crimes they didn’t commit, based on highly suspect testimony.

The question was never really resolved, but certainly suppressed-memory syndrome has fallen out of favor as a topic for movie plot twists and daytime talk shows (if only this would happen to the paternity-testing gimmick). Smiley herself no longer discusses “A Thousand Acres,” I notice, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s why. How awkward, to win a Pulitzer Prize for an otherwise brilliant novel with a rusty hinge at its center.

I keep telling Kate that if she only takes a bite of my beet salad — roasted beets, toasted walnuts, bleu cheese and balsamic vinegar — she will love it as much as I do. She refuses, of course. In her mind, she already has.

So, bloggage and clarifications:

Mitch Harper picked up on a line in my recollection of the Warsaw Street market the other day, the one about the couple who had been married 60 years and plainly hated one another. He asked if I was referring to the Klines, who anchored the place for years. Of course I wasn’t. Amos and Marce Kline were married at least that long but were giddily in love with one another. One of the saddest things about my Saturday visits was talking to Amos in the years after Marce died; he was simply devastated by her loss. He died last year, and it was one passing that I took note of and told myself, “Wherever he is, I hope he’s with Marce again.” That was a match for eternity.

No, it wasn’t them. I forget the name of the couple I’m thinking of, probably because I always thought of them as the Bickersons.

OK, then: I was purging bookmarks last night and almost cleansed Gregg Sutter’s blog, so infrequently is it updated. But I hit it one last time and I’m glad I did, because otherwise I would have missed this gem, complete with un-PC illustration. Memories of a Catholic boyhood? The setup for another Elmore Leonard novel? Your call.

On that note, I’m outta here for the weekend. Happy egging. I’ll be eating beet salad.

There are days when I open my newspaper and wonder why any journalist would ever want to work anywhere other than Detroit. The humor in this sentence is so dry it only needs to be watered every 4,000 years:

But, as is often the case with Detroit school board meetings, the evening did not go smoothly.

I’ll say. The meeting wouldn’t have been a pleasant one anywhere; declining enrollment and the continuing train wreck of student performance dictate that many, many schools must close for good over the summer — a jaw-dropping 34. As you might imagine, this plan is not popular. As you might not imagine, the meeting where the closings were finally approved produced mayhem:

Audience members disrupted the meeting by humming in unison and shouting. One person threw grapes at the board, striking Vice President Joyce Hayes-Giles.

Grapes. Humming. Shouting. They had a raucous school board meeting in Fort Wayne a couple weeks ago, and the superintendent threatened to call security because some people spoke out of turn. I wonder what she’d do if she were hit in the forehead with a grape.

Of course, this is not a funny story at all. The sad encapsulation of woe:

Unless schools are leased or sold, by fall the city will have about 64 empty public schools and 11 empty Catholic schools. The closures are a result of declining birth rates, the city’s population decline and the loss of students to charter and nearby suburban schools, which receive the state funds for each student they lure away.

As I read somewhere (I think it was a Jim Harrison novel), if you think a factory smokestack belching fire is ugly, just wait until it isn’t.

Again with the dolorous opening salvo. Not my usual style. But then, if you’d awakened this morning to blowing snow, droopy daffodils and temperatures in the low 30s, you’d be feeling pretty damn bitchy this morning, too. Today’s projected high: 38 degrees. A 38-degree day in January is a gift. A 38-degree day in April is a smack in the face. Today I have to plan my Easter dinner. Checking forecast…oh hooray, it’s predicted to be 39 degrees on Easter Sunday. A beef stew sort of forecast, but no, we’ll have ham and potatoes and deviled eggs and all the rest of it. But I don’t care what anybody says, no pastel linens for me. I’m wearing a black wool sweater, and screw you if you don’t like it.

Busy day for me, a truly multimedia one. I need to make significant progress in projects for the web, print and — yes, really — a book. The latter is only a possibility — a bid, to be precise. But every time I think I’m wasting my time at this freelancing stuff, I look back over the last year and note two things:

1) I made more money last year than I did my last full year in the newspaper business; and
2) Versatile is now my middle name. In fact, I think I’ll change it right now.

Go be my little Easter bunny in the comments. I’m going to put flannel sheets on the bed one last time.

Some years ago, when I was a nervous new mother convinced my offspring would burst into flames if I took my eyes off her for even a minute, I was fortunate to stumble across a great book on keeping your kids safe — Gavin de Becker’s “Protecting the Gift.”

It turns out de Becker and I share the same basic ideas about personal safety. For starters, 98 percent of the people in the world are decent and law-abiding and it makes no sense to stay inside worrying about the remaining 2 percent. Also, that it’s better to teach children coping skills than to overprotect them. He also gives tremendous advice, one piece I’ve taught Kate since she was old enough to listen: If you’re lost, in trouble or need help, ask a woman. Women are hard-wired to protect children. Most adult women are mothers, and even the ones who aren’t are highly unlikely to be predators. Women don’t have the automatic better-not-be-seen-touching-this-strange-kid worries of men. And women don’t just turn a kid over to a security guard and go on shopping. Women wait until the parents are reunited with the kid, and if that doesn’t happen, offer to adopt the wayward imp.

Anyway, I’m wondering if I should reconsider. Two recent stories make me think something’s done awry with the female of the species.

First story: Buncha crackheads hatch a plan to kidnap some dealer they’re convinced has a hundred grand in cash and all the coke they ever dreamed of. Only, hey, it doesn’t go so well, and at the end of this caper, they’re left with two cowering kids on the floor, boys 11 and 13. The woman who’s running the show demands one of her male partners shoot them both. The man refuses. She grabs the gun and gives them both one in the head.

Second story: Police arrest a woman who’s been negotiating via e-mail with a man, who says he wants to come to Detroit and have sex with a 7-year-old. Her 7-year-old. Who, she tells him, has done this sort of thing before. Among the various grim punchlines: She has four other children, three of them girls.

She’s being held on $1 million bond. Here’s hoping she never draws another free breath.

I have no illusions about women behaving badly. It’s just that I expect women to protect children, or at least do them no harm. It’s doubly disturbing when it’s as bad as these cases.

Not that I wish to bring anyone down today. Let’s change the subject abruptly!

I called my sister Monday morning, to wish her a happy birthday. She has entered the great middle zone of birthdayhood — in which the passing years are marked not with cake and presents and maybe a special dinner, but an “eh, another birthday” and maybe a phone call from your sister. I was driving to Dearborn, had left early in anticipation of the terrible Opening Day traffic, but was having a pretty breezy trip, all things considered.

“Opening Day?” she asked. Oh yeah, baseball. They were thinking about other games in Columbus yesterday. Ah, but that didn’t work out so well, did it? Maybe Ohio State should change its marketing slogan to “Florida’s bitch.”

Yesterday was better-suited to baseball, anyway — warm and breezy and springlike. A more typical Detroit O.D. forecast is on its way for the remainder of the week, i.e., temperatures in the 30s and snow flurries. I can’t stand it.

OK, bloggage: Rep. Mike Pence, R-Dumbassville, Ind., compared his heavily fortified stroll through Baghdad (“…with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees — the equivalent of an entire company — and attack helicopters circling overhead. The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hourlong visit.” — NYT) to “a normal outdoor market in Indiana.” Ah, yes. I think I can explain.

When I lived in Fort Wayne, I used to visit the Warsaw Street farmer’s market, on the south side. It wasn’t strictly an outdoor market — it took place in a roomy, shed-type building in the shape of an H — but it was pretty close. There I bought the best peaches in five states, chicken and bacon from the slowest-moving elderly farmer you ever saw, pumpkins and flowers in season, the occasional organic vegetable array from Organic Man. There was a guy who sold nothing but garlic, whom I loved. Another guy was Mr. Honey. One or two weekends in June, you could buy 25 pounds of pitted sour cherries quick-frozen with five pounds of sugar, i.e., enough pie filling to last a year. There was an old couple who plainly a) hated one another; and b) had been married for at least 60 years. I loved it fiercely.

And I usually stopped to chat with one or two of the market’s board members, one of whom would always lament that business just wasn’t what it used to be. They were right — the place was a little smaller every year, a few more booths that once sold fresh, homegrown vegetables given over to secondhand clothes or odd, it-fell-off-the-truck canned goods. They were losing a whole generation to supermarket produce, while the yuppies that were a market’s natural constituency lived too far away. Which always led to the second topic of conversation — the neighborhood thing.

The market was in a humble neighborhood that was — let’s just come out and say it — mostly non-white. It wasn’t unsafe. By Detroit standards, it was a raging success story. But it was east of Calhoun and north of Rudisill, and that meant that there were many people who simply wouldn’t feel safe there, even on Saturday morning, and wouldn’t visit unless they had, to bring us back to Pence’s original comment, 100 soldiers in armored Humvees, attack helicopters circling overhead and sharpshooters on nearby roofs.

So I can see where he’s coming from.

Nowadays I visit the Eastern Market. It attracts a different sort of merchant than Warsaw Street. Sellers at the Eastern hawk their goods in loud voices. You haven’t lived until you’ve bought at $2 poinsettia the week before Christmas from a guy bellowing HO HO HO THEY ALL GOTTA GO four feet from your ear.

The day commences. I’m out.

Boy, there’s nothing I like better than clattering the keys for 30 minutes or so, with the certain knowledge that what I wrote, or most of it, will never see the light of day. Don’t care. It felt good.

For what it’s worth, it was a letter to the editor, and if it gets butchered, well, it’s my own fault — you just don’t submit 638-word letters to the editor. Maybe they’ll run it as a guest column. If it sinks beneath the waves entirely, I’ll post it here. But they get first crack at it.

(Don’t get your hopes up; it’s a topic of little interest outside journalism. But it’s of interest to me.)

The end of a long week. For the first time in quite a few, I have a full plate — a long-term project and a couple of meaty stories to figure out. This will require time management, i.e., not spending so much time surfing the web while picking my nose. Fine with me. It’s appalling, how much I know about stupid b.s. like blogwar squabbles and the exact tactics used by Cathy Seipp’s online stalker. It makes me think that a certain portion of the human brain is simply roped off for inconsequential data; when we’re young we fill it with the lyrics of “Afternoon Delight” and the technique for playing the “Combat” theme on the harmonica, and now we fill it with crap from the internet. If only the new data would overwrite the old. But no.

Actually, the Seipp-stalker story is pretty interesting, if only as an illustration of the ways the internet facilitates mental dysfunction. (Which is sort of a theme to my too-long letter to the editor, too, but never mind.) As many of you know, I had a crazy man obsessed with me for a long time, too. Every so often someone sends me some random spew that indicates he still hasn’t gotten over it. Lance Mannion once wrote him a letter that said, “If you don’t get professional help, soon you’ll be locked in a padded room, using your own excrement to paint pictures of Nancy on the wall. On second thought, that’s what you’re doing now.” This ranks as one of the more stylish smackdowns in my memory, and yet another reason I love Lance.

I should note, however, that it did no good. The murals continued.

OK, now should be some bloggage, some tasty tidbits to carry you into the weekend.

…Sorry, I don’t have any. Post your own in the comment. Back after the weekend.

How did a deuce like me end up with an ace like Alan? This is something I think about frequently, usually on a day like yesterday, when I notice that my husband, the man who chose me to marry, is doing something like taking apart a 36-year-old bicycle drum brake and going hmm, OK, this goes here and that goes there and maybe we should clean out some of this rust, and, and…

Getting ahead of myself.

Project Tandem has reached its conclusion. After a series of coordinated phone calls, e-mails and a late-afternoon drive to Lansing, we’re the new owners of a 1971 Schwinn Deluxe Twinn, five-speed tranny, in Kool Lemon. It’s dreamy. And although it’s in excellent condition for a bike of its age, it hadn’t been ridden in decades and needed some work. Alan spent Sunday learning its mysteries.

First were the tires. How, we wondered, did such cracked and rotted tires, surely the originals, still manage to feel as full and drum-tight as they did? Whatever, they’d have to go; it was only a matter of time before they gave way. He drove a nail into one to deflate it. It not only didn’t go flat, it didn’t want to give up the nail. He tried prying the tire off the rim with a screwdriver, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally, I looked up to see Alan removing the tire with, yes, a saw. The “tube,” such as it was, revealed itself to be a length of stout rubber hose suitable for beating South American political prisoners. Weighed about three pounds each. The guy at the bike shop said he’d only heard of such things; they’re a specialty item for slender rubber tires used in places where they’d go flat frequently, like the floor in a carpet-tack factory, perhaps.

Anyway, they’re gone now. Next was the brake.

I don’t know about you, but I approach most machinery with a certain wary respect. I’m not totally buffaloed by it, but I recognize that the capability of understanding precisely how things work is either beyond me or of little interest. Alan’s knowledge is harder-won; he grew up in a working-class family, where if you needed something fixed, you fixed it yourself. The idea of paying someone to do something you could do yourself was not only preposterous, but wasteful, like paying someone to scratch your back. And since Alan was a boy with a bicycle and then a minibike and then a motocross racer, in a family that owned outboard motors and lawn mowers and small electrics, he learned quickly that if you took something apart carefully, you could usually figure out what the problem was, fix it, and then reassemble it with no harm done, at a fraction of the price a repair shop would charge.

Anyway, this bike, which weighs around 60 pounds (65 with the old tires) and carries two people, needs more serious stopping power than two caliper-style brakes would provide. So the rear brake is a drum. “I really don’t know how that works,” the seller’s wife said as we were looking it over.

“It’s simple,” Alan said. “There’s a cam, and when you put on the brake, the cam rotates and presses two shoes to the outside of the drum, and stops its turning.” She nodded politely. I recognized the expression on her face.

Alan disconnected the cable from the brake, removed the wheel, removed two nuts and then a third, and lifted off the top of the drum. “Just as I suspected,” he said. “Rust.” He cleaned it out with mineral spirits and then — I still can’t believe he can do this — put it back together. Then he put it back on the frame. And then he reconnected the cable, which involved three or four different nuts and twisty things. And he drenched it all in WD-40. And now it works like aces.

I know the feeling he gets when I marvel over this; it’s the same one a woman gets when her 24-year-old boyfriend is tucking into the first home-cooked meal she’s made for him. He looks at her with love in his eyes. She has performed alchemy, just like Mom. She’s marriage material.

And then there was more WD-40, and an Unfortunate Chain Incident (quickly put right), and we were ready to take it out. I have no pictures of the shakedown cruise, but here’s the finished project:

The basket is for carrying home picturesque bags of groceries, with carrot greens and six inches of baguette protruding from the top. The lock is for current Detroit realities. (The brand’s motto: “Tough world. Tough locks.”) The rest is for fun.

So, bloggage:

Most of you aren’t journalists, so I won’t spend much time on this, but I got an e-mail from a friend last week, when the Great Los Angeles Times Guest Editor Crisis was unfolding. A short e-mail. In its entirety, it read: Is it just me, or has our profession gone completely off its rocker? I replied: It’s not just you. I was thinking the same thing. Michael Kinsley sums it up well.

Why I love This American Life: Last week’s show was “What I Learned From TV.” The last chapter has Dan Savage, gay parent, telling why he’s creeped out by “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.” I was listening to it and found Kate creeping close to eavesdrop — after all, she kept hearing the names of characters she knows like siblings — and I had to say, while wiping laughter-tears from my eyes, “Look, someday you can hear this, but not yet.” (Astonishingly, she accepts this explanation.) But you, you’re a grown-up. Enjoy.

When I see a promo line reading, “George Will on anger,” I’m gonna read it. It should not surprise you to learn that George Will disapproves of anger. Why not try superciliousness, like him? The anger directed at Bush today, like that directed at Clinton during his presidency, luxuriates in its own vehemence, he writes. Funny how it didn’t bug him so much then.

Where does Ken Levine find these things? Girl is deathly afraid of pickles, so she goes on “Maury,” where people chase her around with pickles:

I like a nice crunchy garlic dill myself.

Buoyed by the success of last summer’s Project Table, I’ve been looking around for another little occupational therapy task for this summer. I check the classifieds daily for just the right diamond in the rough. I’m looking for something old, neglected and without lots of pain-in-the-ass scrollwork or other detail that will drive me crazy when I’m trying to strip/stain/varnish it. If it’s something I can use when it’s all done, so much the better, but something to sell would be OK, too. It has to be cheap. It has to have a certain nay-say-quaw, as those Frenchies say.

In other words, I’m looking for a low, wide bookcase, unless I’m not. I’ll know it when I see it.

One of the great tragedies of the impending death of the American newspaper is the loss of yet another source of accidental stories. All the effort goes into Page One, but the rest of the paper is full of nuggety goodness, too, with the added attraction of not being all laid out and packaged for you; you get the thrill of connecting the dots yourself. Yesterday the editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press made Romenesko for speaking aloud this heresy: Readers buy papers for the ads, too. Well, duh.

For this reason, I’ve always loved the classifieds. Classifieds are super-short stories told in 10 words or less: Wedding dress, size 16, never worn. Make offer. Or: Moving out of state, must sell misc. furniture. Bedroom, living room, kitchen. Traveling light, all must go. When I was stuck for column ideas, I’d turn to the classifieds to get the juices flowing. Sometimes I’d be close to tears. I’d keep thinking about that size-16 wedding dress, NWT.

Now the classifieds are online, on Craigslist. People selling something inexpensive don’t want to spend much on the ad for it. Twice a day I check the furniture-for-sale listings. I have to check it twice because it’s so active, and if you fall behind you’ll miss something. You’ll be relieved to know that even without the self-imposed brevity that goes with paying by the word, the free Craigslist classifieds are as rich with narrative drama as the ink-on-paper kind. Everyone’s moving out of state, it seems. Everyone’s downsizing. Everyone’s liquidating a business, divorcing or otherwise re-ordering their lives. And there’s still stunning waste in the corporate world. Two Le Corbusier black leather chairs for sale, with this note: They were used for one day (one day!!) on stage at an executive conference for one of the car companies. We’re not using them again, so….here they are.

Other cultural notes to be gleaned: If you have an armoire-style entertainment center you’re ready to part with, take it out in the back yard and bust it up for firewood, because you’re not going to get a dime for it in this market. The new entertainment center is long, low and buffet-style, the better to show off your plasma-screen, my dear, and everyone’s trying to get rid of the old one. My father (who sold furniture) always said you should spend your money on wood, not upholstery, because the latter declined in value faster; I think of him whenever I see some poor shlub expecting to get six bills for a double-reclining La-Z-Boy sofa (“from a pet-free, non-smoking home”). Also, this: Whoever came up with the idea of the bed with bookcase headboard, recessed lighting and Luuuuvv Mirror is awaiting a place in the levels of hell reserved for the tacky. Finally, correct spelling is the trigonometry of modern life — no one can do it anymore. I’ve looked at ads for “intertainment centers,” “armwars” and my personal favorite, a pair of “Chip and Dale chairs.”

Haven’t found my bookcase/table/whatever yet. But it’s out there, I just know it. The other day someone was selling two ’40s-style office chairs, in oak, with the added backstory that they were from one of the old Ford factory offices and were given to Dad upon his retirement. See, that’s something you wouldn’t see in a newspaper classified, not when you pay by the word. Just thinking about all the gabardined behinds that sat in those chairs, and the work those people did — designing the Edsel, maybe — is almost impossibly romantic to me. Which is why I always pay too much for stuff like that.

(On the other hand, my sister credits my occasional rewrites of her eBay listings with bringing higher prices. I turned a description of a Heisy glass cocktail shaker with an etched fly-fishing scene into an evocation of the lost era of Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway. It sold for nearly $400. [Blows smoke from pistol barrel.])

So, bloggage:

You will get me on the Grand Canyon Skywalk when you pry my cold, dead fingers from the closest upright land-rooted structure, then quiet the shrieking of my ghost as my corpse is carried onto it. I mean, for someone nervous at heights, this is nightmare material. Good luck with that tourism, Hualapai tribe.

American Idol observation: If LaKisha wanted to cover a James Bond theme sung by another black woman with a big voice like hers — and I can think of no other motivation for choosing Shirley Bassey’s little corner of the British Invasion — why on earth didn’t she pick “Goldfinger”? Yet again, Ken Levine is the go-to funny guy for this:

Interesting that not one contestant chose a Herman’s Hermits song. I just picture Hannibal Phil Stacey singing “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” and Mrs. Brown being so terrified she gets a restraining order. …Sanjaya is now just humiliating himself every week. This is like when people dress up their dogs. William Hung was cringing. Please vote him off before Tony Bennett week. I beg of you.

OK, so let’s sign off with an eternal truth: When all else fails, a pretty girl can still move mountains with the right outfit. Particularly if it lacks foundation garments:

The view from the front window this morning. I regret I couldn’t quite capture the fat-fluffy-flakes sense of how hard it’s snowing, but you get the idea. Spring, nearly, in the Mitten.