Good morning, welcome to July 2006. We’re having a heat wave, the Middle East is in yet another spasm of hatred and death and explosions and blood and guess what? If you choose a doctor or drug store or ambulance driver, now you have another question to ask them. After you go through the usual — proximity to your home or office, staff privileges at a local hospital, willingness to accept new patients, board certification, office hours on weekends/holidays — after all that, now you get to ask them this:

“Do you have any religious convictions that might preclude your delivery of care? Might you balk at a particular vaccine, a circumstance of my lifestyle, a shadow that passes over the world not to your liking? At some point in our relationship, might your fears over the fate of your immortal soul get in the way of my health care? Yes? Well, I guess my search continues.”

WashPost has the story:

Around the United States, health workers and patients are clashing when providers balk at giving care that they feel violates their beliefs, sparking an intense, complex and often bitter debate over religious freedom vs. patients’ rights. …For Debra Shipley, her duties as a nurse began to conflict with her Christian faith when the county health clinic where she worked near Memphis required she dispense the morning-after pill. “I felt like my religious liberties were being violated,” said Shipley, 49, of Atoka, Tenn. “I could not live with myself if it did it. I answer to God first and foremost.”

And so on and on and on. Some anesthesiologists refuse to assist in sterilization procedures. Respiratory therapists sometimes object to removing ventilators from terminally ill patients. Gynecologists around the country may decline to prescribe birth control pills. Some doctors reject requests for Viagra from unmarried men.

I like that last one. They don’t like your sex life. So you don’t get your ED meds. Tough luck, buddy.

Here’s my single favorite anecdote, from a sidebar:

Cynthia Copeland also had a run-in with a pharmacist in 2004. He wrongly assumed she was planning an abortion because she had a prescription for a drug that can be used for that purpose. In fact, Copeland had already had undergone a procedure to remove a fetus that had no pulse, and she needed the drug to complete the process.

“I was sitting there in the drugstore waiting and heard the pharmacist say really loudly, ‘I refuse to participate in an abortion,’ ” said Copeland, 39, who lives near Los Angeles. “I felt so violated. The miscarriage was about grief, and that was made public in a way that really compounded my grief.”

Notice how loud he said it. He wanted to make sure she heard it. Also, God.

Of course, most people who live in large cities will easily be able to find another doctor. It’s the folks stuck in Fargo or Casper or some other remote outpost of civilization who will be stuck driving 120 miles to find a pharmacist who will give them a pack of Plan B after a rape.

OK, I’ll stop now. It’s hot and the world’s at war, and it somehow makes more sense to be bugged by religious hysterics than Hezbollah.

Man, what about this weather we’re having? I spent all of Sunday indoors, my usual policy when the temperature rises much above 90. Frolicking in heat waves is for children and crazy people. The rest of us stay in the shade and try not to exert ourselves.

So I have two stories to write before noon. It’s a different kind of exertion. Back later.

I look at it this way: You can track pop culture through slavish devotion to, and reading of, NN.C.

Or you can wait for the Washington Post to catch up.

Your call.

Sweet criminey, but the work just keeps on comin’. Not that this makes me a bad blogger — for you, I always have time — but it does make me a dull boy. Yesterday I finally looked up from my glowing screen, observed a beautiful day in progress outdoors, and made a run for the pool. I sat under an umbrella and read analog media while Kate swam.

A woman nearby was there with three young children. The whole family seemed a little overrevved; after a minor incident between the two little boys, the older boy had a toddler-style meltdown. (And he wasn’t a toddler.) He was actually jumping up and down in front of his mother, demanding justice for his little brother, which I suspect involved beheading or caning. She finally ended the tirade with a backhanded slap to the midsection and a few harsh words in a foreign tongue. The boy shrieked, “I’M NEVER COMING TO THE POOL AGAIN!” and went off to sulk.

After a bit, a man arrived, not dressed for the pool (black socks with Top-Siders — OMG!). He seemed thrilled to see the children, and the children were thrilled to see him. The mother sat as if turned to stone. I went back to my reading, and when I looked up again, he was gone, and mother was screaming at someone on her cell phone. I mean: Screaming. In another language, which I couldn’t identify, but it had many harsh fricatives. This went on at length; people were edging away from her. Finally she slammed the phone shut, sat up and wept for a while behind her sunglasses. In the midst of this, her youngest, a girl of about one, began to wail. She ignored the screaming baby for what seemed like hours. It was a grim, grim scene.

What are you supposed to do at times like these? I mean, if I had three kids under five and a presumably estranged husband, not to mention about 60 pounds of weight to lose, I’d feel like screaming and weeping myself. But to go over and offer her support would be an open acknowledgment that all this stuff is going on in public, which would be embarrassing, and…and…

I went back to my book. Her burden seemed too enormous, not only for her, but for me, too.

And now I have approximately…checking…2,500 words of copy to send singing out of the house by day’s end. Time to cry havoc and let slip.

Last year I took it easy in July and August, and consequently was so broke in September — a month that demands insurance premiums on both cars and a property-tax payment — that at one point I had $50 to last two weeks. And I applied for a job with the AP. Last fall’s No. 1 humiliation: I didn’t get a callback. From the AP. About which it is said, by those who work there: “You can’t spell ‘cheap’ without ‘AP.'”

But things corrected themselves, as they will, and for once I actually learned something from adversity, and that is: Do not loaf through July and August, at least not without some advance planning. Yesterday I spent pretty much all day on the phone and at the keys, and at the end of it came away with steely resolve:

I HAVE to redecorate my office.

By “redecorate” I mean paint and new window treatments. This and our bedroom are the last that need to be claimed as ours, and my office still has the nursery wallpaper border around the ceiling, a peaceable-kingdom scene in which giraffes, monkeys, lions and giraffes all frolic in a riot of pastel. Yes, it’s the baby’s room, where I work. No wonder I took last summer off.

Besides paying work, I’m starting to noodle around with a piece of fiction I started in the fall, shelved, rewrote, shelved, etc. Last week I found myself at an estate sale, writing fiction in my head about the people whose house it was. Nothing makes me feel more guilty or more delighted than sweeping through a house and making judgments about its owners based on the things they own. I have to stop myself every third room and mentally smack my cheeks, but I can’t help it — I have that silly reporter’s vanity that says I can look at your grocery cart and tell you everything about yourself. Which is nonsense. But it’s still fun.

My last sale was my favorite kind. Most sales are held at the dusty, cobweb-strewn homes of the elderly, and the signs are all around — a Livia Soprano lift chair bolted to the staircase, framed portraits of children already faded with age, walkers and wheelchairs and the other detritus of old age. But this sale was different, plainly the goods of a family still in its prime. There were children’s toys and stylish clothing and the sort of toys affluent people buy. You want to know why an upper-middle-class family of four needs 4,000 square feet of living space at a minimum? To hold all their crap.

I’ve never seen so much casually discarded money — a 10-volume video series on how to improve your golf swing, an octagonal poker table with cutout slots for drinks and chips, not one but three entertainment centers. And because the greatest sin one can commit in this tax bracket is not exercising 90 minutes a day, whole rooms of workout equipment, treadmills and weightlifting benches and elliptical trainers. Running shoes, biking shoes, skis, golf clubs. Closets full of Brooks Brothers suits and Nicole Miller cocktail dresses (size range: 6 to 8. Drat.).

I look at all this crap and construct narratives: They’ve had enough of the getting and spending, and have decided to chuck it all and move to Nepal. When, I fear, the truth is probably one of two options: 1) Divorce; or 2) Job transfer, and the crap that’s being sold will simply be replaced by new crap at the new house. After all, the 10-volume golf-swing series is on VHS, and we’ve all moved on to DVDs. And those cocktail dresses have the wrong hemline.

So I think I need to get it out of my system, one way or another.

All this by way of saying I have little or no bloggage today. Except, maybe, this question: What’s the worst thing about being a public servant?

Seeing representations of your colon on the front page of the local newspaper. That’s what.

Many years ago, some colleagues of mine wrote a story about a religious lockdown facility for wayward girls in rural Indiana, a place called Hephzibah House. As I recall, the place was secretive and uncooperative and didn’t relish the secular media sniffin’ around the yard.

Well, that was many years ago. Now they have a website.

Dorothy wondered, in the comments on the previous post, just who actually wears some of those goony modest-clothing outfits I’ve linked to in the past. Wonder no more. There’s a strain of religious fundamentalism in northeast Indiana that makes much of the so-called Bible Belt look like Hillary for President volunteers.

What a weekend. The perfect weather continues, although it’s now somewhat less than perfect, having crossed into “too dry.” But it’s not too hot, and so I was able to go to the Eastern Market Saturday without too much misery other than the usual — parking, mainly. I love the Eastern Market, having been deprived of the Rich Stew of Humanity for too long at my previous addresses, which offered fairly thin gruel at the stove of humanity. I didn’t actually buy any stew ingredients, unless you count tart cherries, which I will craft into a pie for next week’s dinner party. The season is so short that my best pie cookbook calls it “Once-a-Year Cherry Pie.” It better be good.

So, on to the bloggage:

In all my years in the newspaper business I’ve accumulated many regrets, but none so keen as this: I never had the opportunity to yell “fuck you” to my publisher. (Actually, I had the opportunity many times, but never took it, even though it would have been richly deserved.) Oh, to work in Santa Barbara these days, where resignation letters fill the air like confetti and a couple dozen journalists are accumulating stories they’ll tell for the rest of their careers.

And it’s all there: A petulant movie star, an insane owner, punishment for infractions of non-existent rules and, once again, my favorite part:

Executive Editor Jerry Roberts returned from a vacation in Crete and turned in his resignation about 9 am. He was then escorted out of the News-Press building by Human Resources chief Yolanda Apodaca. On the way out, tearful reporters and editors hugged Roberts and wished him well. As this happened, Travis Armstrong, Roberts’s nemesis at the News-Press, emerged from his office to make sure that Roberts left, reportedly saying something to the effect of, “Roberts you’ve got to go.” According to one report, Armstrong — who appointment as publisher of the News Press last Friday precipitated Roberts’ resignation — clasped his hand around Roberts’ arm to help escort him from the building. This was greeted by a chorus of “Fuck You, Travis!” from the News-Press employees bidding Roberts goodbye. The chorus reportedly continued for some time; one of the louder voices in that choir belonged to Metro Editor Jane Hulse, who likewise had submitted her resignation that day.

I forgot that “vacation in Crete” part. That’s the phrase that’ll kill in barroom retellings: “I recall the editor had just returned from vacation in Crete when…”

Meanwhile, breaking butter-cow news from Ohio, for all fans of butter sculpture. The shocking detail: The butter used in the annual state fair sculpture? Comes from Texas. There’s good detail — the only creamery in Ohio capable of providing the one-ton chunk needed for sculpting only makes salted butter, and the sculpture requires unsalted. The fair director offers this alternative: “In Ohio, we’re No. 1 in Swiss cheese production, but I don’t think it would look real good if we had a holey cow instead of butter,” Strickler said. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

No, it wouldn’t. But it would be interesting.

Make merry in the comments! I have work to do.

In “The Virgin Suicides,” Grosse Pointe native Jeffrey Eugenides’ first novel, he uses the dying elm trees of the 1970s as a metaphor. Leans a little too heavily on it for my taste, but that’s me and J.E.; I like his books fine, but stop short of love.

Anyway, this is another Summer of the Doomed Trees. Cock an ear, and you can hear chippers almost every day, somewhere around our neighborhoods. It’s not elms this year but ash trees, thanks to the emerald ash borer. Our next-door neighbors have a particularly nice specimen in their front yard, and have spared no expense in trying to spare it; a man comes every month or so to treat it with pesticides and other potions.

But it’s an exception. All over the Pointes, you can see ash trees wtih neon-colored Xs on the trunk, the arborist’s kiss of death. Oh, it’s so, so sad. I feel a metaphor coming on.

Sometimes a tree disease is just a tree disease. Diversify your rootstock and prune regularly.

Bloggage:

Alcohol: Cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. More on the missing-arm case. (Warning: As of this morning, the Freep servers were either drunk or had molasses poured in their works. FYI.)

Lance Mannion delivers a lecture I’ve heard a few times in person already: Why Taxation Isn’t (Always) Theft. Part 1 and Part 2.

Slate offers an amusing slide show on the history of the bikini. I loved the part about the bathing machines. Of course, if you can’t wear a bikini, there are alternatives.

Have a great weekend.

Today’s no-comment only-in-Detroit story:

Wife’s severed arm leads to arrest.

And great details:

A Romulus man whose wife mysteriously lost an arm early Sunday has been arrested and is expected to be arraigned Thursday on several charges, including drunken driving causing serious injury, police said today. Stephen Humphrey, 39, is now in the Monroe County Jail. His wife, 34-year-old Brenda Humphrey, arrived at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Superior Township missing her right arm. Police have searched for days for both the crime scene and the missing arm but have found neither.

If you find an arm lying around somewhere in southeast Michigan, please contact the authorities.

The weather here is perfect. All week, perfect perfect perfect, edging toward “a bit warm” by the end of the week, but otherwise, el perfecto. So let’s dispense with the weather chitchat and let me ask your opinion of a question currently gripping Casa NN.C:

Is the phrase “strappy sandal” redundant?

Alan, Mr. Editor, claims it is. He remarked upon it after finding the usage in a Wall Street Journal story about the flirty new skirts, or something like that. The writer remarked that the flirty new skirts require just the right strappy sandal.

He remarked that it’s the nature of a sandal to be strappy, that strappiness defines the sandal at its core, and to imply otherwise is, well, stupid. Like calling a shoe “soley,” perhaps.

I argued that there is indeed such a thing as a strappy sandal, and I couldn’t define at which point an ordinary sandal tipped over into strappiness, but that I knew it when I saw it.

This is a strappy sandal. This is not.

“So a strappy sandal has, what, extra straps?” he asked.

“Basically, yes.”

“That’s really stupid.”

Alan then noted my Teva sandals, which have noticeably more straps than his Teva sandals, and wondered if those were strappy. Of course not, I said. No Teva can ever be strappy. Strappy sandals are dress shoes, or dress-up shoes, or at least dressier shoes, but utilitarian? No.

Men just don’t have Shoe Eyes.

Any other mysteries of female clothing you want explained? Leave them in the comments.

My fellowship director referred to upmarket business attire as “power clothes.” He always wears power clothes, but of late, I have an allergy to them. I have a meeting with two editors in about an hour, normally a power-clothes occasion. They proposed we meet at a coffeehouse about two miles from my house.

“In summer, I try to enforce a no-drive zone for errands like this,” I said. “How would you feel if I wore shorts and arrived a little sweaty, but fully alert? I’ll be riding my bicycle.”

“I think that’s admirable,” she said.

Admirable! I think I’m onto something. T-shirts = the new power clothes.

So I have to get ready. In the meantime, Slate explains why in the battle between condoms and abstinence as a means to control STD transmission, the condoms are winning. (Hint: Because they work better.) However, what I noticed about it was that the anti-condom forces, who continue to insist, in the face of all the evidence, that you gents’d be better-off wrapping up in a few inches of mosquito net for all the good they do, is led by my ex-congressman.

Last month, biological warfare on Colombia, this month, science denial. Par for the course.

Back later. Make merry in the comments, if you wish.

A weekend in the country — at the lake, actually. Ah, the country. All my favorite colors, your greens and blues, dabbed here and there with the orange of tiger lilies. And, of course, my friends the birds.

I’ve probably said it here before, so go ahead and skip this paragraph if you want, but for a low-stress hobby made for midlife, you really can’t beat birding. And if you want a high-stress hobby, you can make it that, too; you can travel all over the world and bag beaks for your life list like any extreme-sports nitwit, but I don’t recommend it. Not when merely lying in a hammock with a good novel and a sharp eye for movement in the trees overhead can be so rewarding.

I got into birds about the time I got out of movie stars, when I realized I could no longer summon a care about who Jack Nicholson was sleeping with or whether REM’s next album would really be a throwback to “Murmur,” or what. I watched a pair of cardinals practice mate-feeding in my back yard, in which the male takes a safflower seed in his beak, turns to the female and gives it to her, the movement very much like a kiss. I was entranced. Alan gave me a feeder and Roger Tory Peterson, and we were off.

I added the Stokes guides to bird behavior, the perfect step up from your basic crow-robin-blue jay identification. Stokes taught me about crows, although it couldn’t explain the goose-macking I saw last year, nor the sparrow-whacking later in the summer. Still, very useful.

This is the thing about birds: They really don’t care about you. While you’re down on the ground thinking your small thoughts, they’re living out a complex drama 30 feet overhead, and to be a witness to it, all you have to do is look up. How can Jennifer Aniston’s love life hold a candle to this?

Here’s another thing: You get better with time. You learn to identify birds the way you identify family members when they’re just out of sight or earshot, through their posture, distinctive movements, silhouettes. Yesterday, just before we got on the freeway, we passed a wetland at 50 miles per hour. I did a speed-ID of a belted kingfisher perched on a wire overhead.

Which doesn’t exactly make me a black belt, to be sure. But I remember the time, years ago, when we went to a friend’s lake house. His wife was lying on her floatie with a pair of binoculars. “I’m looking at the most amazing loon,” she said. Wow, a loon? Not unheard of in northeast Indiana, surely, but unusual at that time of year (June). I borrowed her binocs, and focused on the spot.

It was a great blue heron. Even I, way back in the day, knew that.

I’ve come a long way, maybe.

So, bloggage:

Kate asked me the other day if there were still pirates in the world. I said yes, but added they weren’t the cutlass-and-argh pirates she was thinking of. I’ll say.

Crossed fingers, good thoughts, prayers or your chosen change-the-future incantations, today, for the hardest-working man in show business, Roger Ebert. He’s recovering today from emergency surgery.

In the Department of It Couldn’t Have Happened to a Nicer Guy, a self-described KKK leader got his ass kicked this weekend. If he dies, maybe I’ll tell the story of the day he led a rally in downtown Fort Wayne. If he doesn’t, I expect it’ll hold for another day.

Finally, after enduring “Bully,” I didn’t think anything could change my mind about sleazebag filmmaker Larry Clark. This doesn’t, exactly, but it’s a good essay just the same.

So, after my 3,000-word job last week, which came at the last minute and so counts as a financial windfall, I was feeling flush. Went to Lowe’s on Monday and bought a ceiling fan for my office. What’s $119? I earned it!

Came home and found the dishwasher had finally given up the ghost. There’s $400 right there. Then, yesterday, I spilled half a cup of coffee on the couch, which will necessitate a visit by Stanley Steemer. Might as well have them do the carpet while they’re here; it needs it — $200 more.

What is that deathless line of Ice Cube’s? Didn’t have to use my AK / I’d have to say, it was a good day. I need one of those days.

I guess yesterday was pretty good, coffee spill and all. There were many fine, fine one-liners about the Limpbaugh affair:

Who knew the EIB Network stood for Erection in a Bottle? — TBogg.

Men have needs, and if Viagra enables the little fella to jut proudly from the folds of the dragon kimono bequeathed to Rush by the late Allan Bloom, it is not for us to cast judgement. — James Wolcott

I spent much of yesterday, the final day of existence for Knight Ridder, jotting down notes for a possible essay on Life in the KR Minors, a sector of the company overlooked by …pretty much everyone. I say “possible” because I’m not sure I want to brand myself as unemployable forever and ever, but I figure if I make it zingy enough, someone might be dumb enough to hire me later. I dunno, it may just end up as notes for a comic novel, who knows? I sent an e-mail to a fellow exile, asking for anecdotes I didn’t remember. He sent this:

There was the time the newspaper did three polls during the mayor’s race between Win Moses Jr., the incumbent, and Paul Helmke. The polls were at the start, in the middle, and eve of election, and fairly well mirrored the final outcome, an upset by Helmke. These were done by a professional polling firm. The next race The News-Sentinel had one poll, done by in-house pollsters in the marketing department. The third elex for Fort Wayne, our polling consisted of a photog asking man on the street questions in front of the library/City-County Building about who they plan to vote for in November. The photographer had to ask the questions and take down the answers because a reporter wasn’t available that day to help out, being assigned something else.

Stop it, you’re killing me. Anyone else want to contribute? You know where to reach me.

Like 99 out of 100 tween girls in the Pointes, Kate has a pair of Crocs this summer. For a pair of plastic shoes, they’re priced a little steeply at $25, but eh, it’s summer and she’s never going to be 9 years old and thrilled by turquoise plastic shoes again. (I hope.) However, buying the shoes is only the beginning. Perhaps because everyone has a pair, some in several colors, the next step has to be personalization. After some discussion about the wise use of one’s allowance, we went online to buy a few Crocs charms to stick into the holes.

If you look at the link immediately above, you’ll see the splash screen features a shoe with “LOVE” spelled out in letter charms. I told Kate all about Robert Mitchum in “The Night of the Hunter” and how amusing and cool it would be if she got charms so that one shoe said “LOVE” and the other “HATE.” Astonishingly — astonishingly! — she rejected this idea, perhaps perceiving that she had grown out of the age when she could be propped up in a stroller and dressed in a T-shirt reflecting her mother’s political opinions.

Still, it would be an amusing sight gag for a mean-girl character in a contemporary teen movie. At least as long as Crocs stay in style. Which, given the time it takes to get a movie made, means…forget it.

Man, what a weekend. Pulsating sunshine, azure sky, low humidity, mild temperatures. We/I celebrated by going sailing in fairly light wind, which sort of sucked (but the sunbathing was nonpareil); working on Project Table; riding the bike all over hell ‘n’ gone; watching “Closer” and going on at least a portion of the Grosse Pointe garden tour.

One of the houses featured a long arbor leading from the house to the pool, with years-old roses climbing all over it. The ground beneath was littered with petals; unfortunately, the tour seemed to catch the arbor between blooming cycles. But I was amazed at the thick canes at the base of the plants, and how the thorns were proportionately large. They twined all around the arbor supports, nature’s own razor wire. It wasn’t the sort of place where you’d want to lose your balance and grab a post for support. Which gave me an idea for a fight scene in a movie, where the rich villain and the cool hero are fighting in the arbor, smashing one another against the thorns and tearing the crap out of one another — except the cool hero still looks very, very handsome — before the villain finally dies from…oh, say, a trowel plunged into the throat.

Gardening can be a very violent sport.

Do I have bloggage? I have a bit:

I loved this NYT story about Larry Kramer, the gay playwright and activist, and his brother Arthur. I suspect Larry is a difficult man to have a close relationship with, and yet I came away amazed yet again by the strange bonds of family and love and all the rest of it. The normal heart, indeed.

I know you wake up every morning and ask yourself, “Hey, whatever happened to Maria Schneider, the girl from “Last Tango in Paris”? She became a junkie, among other things. She also starred with Jack Nicholson in “The Passenger,” which is finally being released on DVD. Now you know.

And now I’m going to take a shower. See you later.