I’m try­ing to ana­lyze yesterday’s pri­mary results, in which a mod­er­ate Repub­li­can, Rick Sny­der, tri­umphed over four oth­ers, and by “tri­umphed,” I mean, “shamed them.” The two tea party can­di­dates, Dutch and Smirky, came in sec­ond and third and split the right wing down the mid­dle. Dutch, Pete Hoek­stra, would have been the lesser of the two evils, but only incre­men­tally, and besides, Sny­der beat him like a drum. How shock­ing to dis­cover that a move­ment based on ide­o­log­i­cal ortho­doxy can’t attract a suf­fi­ciently ortho­dox can­di­date to please every­one.

Or, in the case of Nevada, a sane one.

The Democ­rats nom­i­nated a fiery pop­ulist, Virg Bernero. Con­ven­tional wis­dom is that we’ll have a Repub­li­can gov­er­nor in fall, and my guess is, Sny­der will beat Bernero like a rented mule. I can live with a Gov. Sny­der.

Else­where, Car­olyn Cheeks Kil­patrick, who stayed holed up in her bunker all night, fell hard to a state sen­a­tor, Hansen Clarke, so that’s show­biz. And in my state-rep pri­mary, the harder-right tea party orga­nizer lost to a more mod­er­ate Repub­li­can who dropped lots of green buzz­words in her plat­form lit­er­a­ture. Michi­gan is a more mod­er­ate state than many, and I don’t want to draw grand con­clu­sions in a time of eco­nomic emer­gency, but I’d say that for the time being, we’re less inter­ested in stop­ping ENCROACHING MARXISM than in get­ting the economy’s engine run­ning again. Just a thought.

It wasn’t a ter­ri­ble day, but a frus­trat­ing one. I had the strong sense of run­ning very hard and gain­ing no ground, which is never pleas­ant. So I went for a fast bike ride in hot-soup weather con­di­tions, then remem­bered I needed milk and OJ. Stopped at Kroger, stepped into the blessed AC and promptly began sweat­ing like some­one hav­ing a heart attack. I must have looked alarm­ing, because an old lady told me to go ahead of her at the check­out. The guy in front wasn’t giv­ing any ground, check­ing out with a case of Miller High Life tall boys. He did tell me, more than once, that his chil­dren didn’t like skim milk, and called it “water milk.” I didn’t tell him that my hus­band didn’t like Miller High Life, no mat­ter what size the can. On the other hand, I just put a six-pack car­ton of his cur­rent favorite in the recy­cling, and glimpsed the price tag: $9.69. FOR A SIX-PACK?!?? Jeez. Oh, well. Bell’s Oberon, if you’re won­der­ing.

And then I sal­vaged what remained of the day with a tomato and corn pie, recipe left in the com­ments last Fri­day by I-forget-who, but I thanks you just the same. It was deli­cious. If you make it your­self, be advised you can use Pills­bury pre-made pie crusts (I did) and any old kind of cheese you want (I did) and even add ingre­di­ents (I’d sug­gest bacon), and you will not be sorry. Less-juicy tomato vari­eties would make it less soupy, but if you just squeeze the pulp out of about two-thirds of them (leav­ing a lit­tle for taste), every­thing will work out juu­u­ust fine. It was the kind of dish that really sal­vaged the evening, even if Kate wouldn’t touch it. More for me.

Today, I’m try­ing to change my luck. “Trans­form­ers 3″ is hir­ing paid extras, so I just sub­mit­ted my deets and head­shot. I think I really missed my chance by not join­ing the “Red Dawn” cast of thou­sands last year; with my fig­ure and excel­lent pro­nun­ci­a­tion of Russ­ian, I was a nat­ural to play a stout les­bian prison-camp guard who makes lusty eyes at one of the young Wolver­ines — you know, the Mary Woronov type.

By the way, when is “Red Dawn 2010″ going to be released? I have about half a dozen films fea­tur­ing Detroit friends and acquain­tances to see, and all of them are backed up like air­craft in a hold­ing pat­tern. Like “The Irish­man.”

Blog­gage: Jolene rec­om­mended this to me, and I finally got around to read­ing it. It’s heart­break­ing, but essen­tial, a typ­i­cally excel­lent Atul Gawande look at a med­ical topic — end-of-life care, in this case. I will spare you the snarky remarks about Sarah Palin and death pan­els.

Oh, and the NYT does yet another story on the thriv­ing Detroit arts scene. These reporters must take a num­ber at some of these instal­la­tions. Oh, well: Beats ruin porn.

And that’s it for me. Where do these sum­mer morn­ings go? (You’re look­ing at it.) It’s blis­ter­ing hot and looks like a storm’s a-comin’, so I might as well get some work done.

The New York Times dis­cov­ers a trend:

At DePaul Uni­ver­sity, the tip-off to one student’s copy­ing was the pur­ple shade of sev­eral para­graphs he had lifted from the Web; when con­fronted by a writ­ing tutor his pro­fes­sor had sent him to, he was not defen­sive — he just wanted to know how to change pur­ple text to black.

And at the Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land, a stu­dent rep­ri­manded for copy­ing from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depres­sion said he thought its entries — unsigned and col­lec­tively writ­ten — did not need to be cred­ited since they counted, essen­tially, as com­mon knowl­edge.

Last year some­time, a local col­lege teacher offered some pieces by his class, who were prepar­ing mul­ti­me­dia jour­nal­ism projects. Since multi is what Grosse​Pointe​To​day​.com is aim­ing for, I said send those pup­pies in.

The first one to arrive had one of those jar­ring prose shifts mid­way through that always sets off the alarm. Sud­denly, the writer began cap­i­tal­iz­ing Impor­tant Con­cepts and her sen­tences took on a dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent rhythm. As some of you know, we made a splash a while back with this very thing, and I snipped a sen­tence from within and asked Pro­fes­sor Google what he thought. Lifted, intact, from Wikipedia. Con­trary to what you might think, I hated being the spoiler, but I let the teacher know, and the usual ker­fuf­fle ensued. The details are unre­mark­able, except for this: The teacher said a full writ­ten apol­ogy was part of her sen­tence. It never arrived. I’m sure she didn’t under­stand the rea­son.

This doesn’t sur­prise me; the line between cita­tion and theft has always been smudgy, and copy-and-paste didn’t start with cntrl-C/cntrl-V. It con­fused me as a stu­dent, and it con­fuses me still, some­times. The term “com­mon knowl­edge” means it belongs to every­one, after all, so I was always wrestling with some cita­tion or another — did I have to foot­note dates? Sim­ple facts? I think the only rea­son it comes eas­ier now is because I’m accus­tomed to report­ing, with all its attri­bu­tion and colons. Police gave this account of the inci­dent: But I’m very glad I don’t have to write papers any­more, and I’m sure my pay­back for point­ing out a cer­tain Bush admin­is­tra­tion official’s pla­gia­rism will come when Kate does this, unwit­tingly, down the road.

My friends already down that road say the next thing is high-school projects, in which teach­ers try to head this stuff off at the pass with some ridicu­lous pro­ce­dures — in-class research, hand-written drafts, etc. It’s a real aggra­va­tion that makes research papers, never anyone’s favorite thing, even more painful.

Any­way, that’s a good story. I rec­om­mend it.

There were lots of good sto­ries this week­end. The Wall Street Jour­nal is rolling out a project on inter­net pri­vacy from the busi­ness angle, i.e., what your browser is telling mar­keters about you. It’s no acci­dent you keep get­ting served ads that eerily track with your inter­ests. I’ll say this for that 3A Tiffany’s ad in most national pub­li­ca­tions — it doesn’t care that I’m not in the mar­ket for expen­sive jew­elry. I get to look at the pretty rings and all they know is, I sub­scribe to a national news­pa­per. Which says a lot right there.

Related: Watch how you tweet, Face­book and YouTube. But you knew that.

Tomor­row is Elec­tion Day in Michi­gan — the pri­maries for gov­er­nor, etc. I notice the tea-party can­di­dates here­abouts are full of con­tempt for the bank bailouts, but are oddly silent about the other big one, which involved a pretty impor­tant indus­try around here. I noticed tea-party types in Fort Wayne prais­ing GM for keep­ing the plant there open, not men­tion­ing what the alter­na­tive pushed by their con­fed­er­ates would have been. Paul Ingras­sia at the WSJ takes a look a year later:

…the bailout was about as pop­u­lar as a flat tire. Many Amer­i­cans nursed long­stand­ing grudges for cars like the 1978 Dodge Omni, in which a wiring defect caused the horn to blow when­ever the steer­ing wheel was turned. (No kid­ding; check Con­sumer Reports.) Oth­ers under­stand­ably feared that Gen­eral Motors would become Gov­ern­ment Motors.

But what alter­na­tive, really, did Mr. Obama have? Had GM and Chrysler col­lapsed and been liq­ui­dated, investors would have picked up some of the pieces. That would have taken years. Mean­while, the parts mak­ers that sup­ply GM and Chrysler would have col­lapsed too. Those same parts mak­ers also sup­ply Ford, Honda, Toy­ota and oth­ers, whose U.S. fac­to­ries would have faced havoc.

The impact on the broad U.S. economy—including the car deal­ers in all 50 states, adver­tis­ing agen­cies, account­ing firms, etc.—would have been some­where between dif­fi­cult and dis­as­trous. Nobody really knows. The Detroit bailout was like chang­ing a dia­per: a dirty job that had to be done because the con­se­quences were worse.

Finally, speak­ing of pla­gia­rism, a recipe, at Deborah’s request, copied (by hand) from Alice Waters’ “Chez Panisse Veg­eta­bles.” I have my prob­lems with Waters as a food-policy expert but cer­tainly not as a chef, and this bean gratin might have been my favorite thing from Saturday’s din­ner. Healthy, light, deli­cious, made with fresh beans, avail­able in mar­kets year-round but espe­cially now:

Fresh shell bean gratin

2 to 3 pounds fresh shell beans (can­nellini, cran­berry, pinto, fla­geo­let, etc.)
salt
6 table­spoons olive oil
1/2 onion
4 cloves gar­lic
1 or 2 sage leaves
optional: 1 small bunch greens (broc­coli raab, chard, mus­tard, turnip, etc.)
2 medium toma­toes
1/2 cup toasted bread crumbs

Shell the beans. Yield will vary accord­ing to vari­ety, but you want to end up with about 3 cups shelled beans. Cook them with just enough water to cover by an inch. (Fresh shell beans absorb very lit­tle water.) When they have come to a boil, add salt and 2 table­spoons olive oil, and lower the heat to sim­mer. Cook until the beans are ten­der, about 30 min­utes. Drain the beans and save their liq­uid.

While the beans are cook­ing, dice the onion and cook it in 2 table­spoons olive oil with the gar­lic cloves, peeled and cut into sliv­ers; the sage leaves, chopped; and some salt. Cook over low heat until soft and translu­cent. If you wish, cook a small bunch of greens with the onion; add a lit­tle of the bean water along with them, if you do. When the onion is cooked, add the toma­toes, roughly chopped, raise the heat, and cook for a minute or two more.

Com­bine the beans in a gratin dish with the onions, toma­toes and greens. Add enough bean water to almost cover. Taste, cor­rect sea­son­ing, and pour the rest of the olive oil over the gratin. (You can pre­pare the gratin in advance to this point, even the day before, and refrig­er­ate it.) Fin­ish by top­ping with the toasted bread crumbs, and bake in a pre­heated 350-degree oven for 45 min­utes. Check occa­sion­ally and moisten with more bean water if it seems to be dry­ing out.

Alice says you can use a vari­ety of beans, which sounds really good, but you have to cook each sep­a­rately, as the cook­ing times will vary.

And now Manic Mon­day com­mences. Must have food for sus­te­nance! I’m think­ing eggs scram­bled with spinach, shal­lots and goat cheese and a big-ass fruit salad on the side. I love sum­mer, I do I do I do I do…

It was hot this week­end. How hot was it? Here’s one of the neigh­bors at Alex’ house:

Alex said he’s never seen a squir­rel relax like this. I have, once. It was on a pic­nic table, and it was stretched out, belly down, in much this fash­ion. It was also on a hot day. Spriggy would stretch out like this, terrier-style, but almost always on a cool sur­face, like a tile floor, or even wood. That pic­nic table wasn’t cool, but maybe it was, rel­a­tive to every­thing around it.

Or maybe squir­rels know the behav­ior, but aren’t good about apply­ing it. Lit­tle pea-brains.

It was a hot week­end, yes. Mid-90s, hor­ri­ble humid­ity. We went to the lake Fri­day, our stag­ing ground for a run to Fort Wayne Sat­ur­day, then home again Sun­day. Kate wanted to see her friends. Alan hadn’t been back since we left. Good news: Our house was sold, down­town looks great, I got a mint-condition large-folio col­lec­tion of New Yorker car­toons in the Friends of the Library shop for $8. (God, I miss that library. The recent expan­sion and remodel cost $80 mil­lion, and required a tax increase. The usual sus­pects whined and passed peti­tions for a remon­strance. Why do we need a fancy library when we have the inter­net, etc. etc. blah blah blah. I would hear none of it. All my damn life my tax money has gone to sup­port sta­di­ums I will never set foot in. Just once I wanted a big fancy public-works project for peo­ple like me, and I got it. And then we moved. Sigh.)

The bad news: The south side is look­ing pretty… what’s the word? Oh yes: Detroity. Our neigh­bor­hood gro­cery, closed. Our neigh­bor­hood Ital­ian restau­rant, closed. Our neigh­bor­hood fancy restau­rant, closed. Gen­eral Elec­tric fac­tory, closed. Lots of ply­wood, lots of For Sale or Lease. The reces­sion hasn’t been kind to any city, but it’s been espe­cially tough on Mid­west man­u­fac­tur­ing cen­ters.

But we saw our old neigh­bor, Deb, and sat out­side in the shade in her lav­ish new out­door kitchen, watch­ing her gold­fish swim in her new out­door pond. She was see­ing a con­trac­tor for a while. I told Alan that if any­thing hap­pened to him, that’s where I’d be hang­ing around — con­struc­tion bars, mak­ing eyes at guys in tool belts. And we saw Alex, and mar­veled at his place in sum­mer­time. I’d only seen it in win­ter, and needed to behold the enor­mous veg­etable gar­den and flower gar­den and boat lift and out­door fire­place. The veg­etable gar­den has an elec­tric fence and metal plates dri­ven a foot deep at the perime­ter to dis­cour­age chip­munks, but they get in any­way. Sug­ges­tions wel­come, I’m sure.

And then home, where a line of thun­der­storms passed through and blew some of the heat away, so I can com­mence Manic Mon­day with a rel­a­tively dry scalp. Some blog­gage:

Roger Ebert on BP. Sim­ple, sane, bewil­dered — as are we all.

Why I love the British news­pa­pers, chap­ter infin­ity. Imag­ine pitch­ing this story to an Amer­i­can edi­tor: “I’d like to ask a vari­ety of promi­nent artists about how Car­avag­gio influ­enced their work.” “News peg?” “None.” “Sounds great!” Would never hap­pen.

The Wik­ileaks doc dump on Afghanistan is today. This New York mag­a­zine piece has sev­eral links within. Read, wail and com­mence gnash­ing teeth. I don’t know what else to do. Except get to work. So that’s where I’m head­ing.

Why we still have a lot of work to do on gay accep­tance. When a guy like this doesn’t feel the need to marry a woman and have sex with men in parks, then maybe we’ll have made real progress.

Oh, what am I talk­ing about? We have made real progress. When I had a bad rid­ing les­son, my instruc­tor would coun­sel the long view: Don’t think about where you are today. Think about where you were six months ago, and how much you’ve improved since then. It’s depress­ing when a mar­ried father of four, faced with arrest in a gay cruis­ing spot, pan­ics and things esca­late to the point of vio­lence. But where were we a few years ago? At least some gay peo­ple can get mar­ried and live out ‘n’ proud. I ran into a mar­ried father of two the other day in the gro­cery store, but he’s mar­ried to another man, the kids are adopted and if they were any more decent and upright, they’d be in dan­ger of being elected to office.

I got an e-mail from a friend the other day:

I wouldn’t call it a mile­stone, but it’s a def­i­nite min­i­s­tone, one of those lit­tle mark­ers that show how the com­plex­ion of ordi­nary life is chang­ing. Dur­ing a four-hour stint at the Wells County 4-H Fair yes­ter­day, I stum­bled into a long talk about, broadly speak­ing, the gay expe­ri­ence. Met a guy I went to high school with, we had eons of time to kill watch­ing our kids in the same events, and we started com­par­ing notes on pol­i­tics. I found that Mr. hyper-Catholic is a low-key gay-rights booster, and it’s a seri­ous area of fric­tion he and his uber-conservative wife have with their extended fam­i­lies.

Their “rad­i­cal­iz­ing” expe­ri­ence: Another of our class­mates, a close friend of theirs, came out to them in the late ’90s. Mr. Catholic had no clue, and he said he was left speech­less and fum­bling to react. “I gotta hand it to my wife. She gave him a big hug and said, ‘Do you have some­one spe­cial? Tell us all about him!’”

On one hand, hers seems a corny reac­tion, like some­thing Grandma would say. But mostly it’s charm­ing that she could sup­press all her reli­gious worry-wartism in a blink and flash him what I think of as the uni­ver­sal old-biddy code for demon­strat­ing accep­tance of gay peo­ple: “Dish the gos­sip on your roman­tic life, on the dou­ble.”

This is, I remind you, one of the most con­ser­v­a­tive cor­ners of one of the most con­ser­v­a­tive states in the union. As I said a while back on another web­site: It’s over. The skir­mishes will con­tinue, but the war is over.

But the skir­mishes will likely con­tinue for pretty much ever. Soci­etal accep­tance will help. The pas­sage of time will help. But there will always be gay peo­ple who feel their attrac­tion to peo­ple of the same sex is wrong, some­how, and want to change it. That’s the part of the pray-the-gay-away move­ment that inter­ests me — the peo­ple who seek it out, for what­ever rea­son.

We like to think that those peo­ple are self-loathing, and no doubt many of them are. But what about those who aren’t? What about peo­ple whose sex­u­al­ity falls some­where in the mid­dle of the con­tin­uum, who want to push it closer to the other side? Do they have any­thing inter­est­ing to say in this? Con­sider that class­mate in Wells County. The tra­di­tional path for a young gay per­son in such a com­mu­nity would be to head to Indi­anapo­lis or Chicago after high school or col­lege, some­where with old houses to fix up and com­mu­nity the­ater and soft­ball leagues and Teva san­dals and other stereo­typ­i­cally gay things, and set­tle in among the crit­i­cal mass a smaller com­mu­nity can’t pro­duce.

But what about the guy — let’s assume a guy, for this argu­ment — who may be same-sex attracted, but actu­ally wants a female wife and chil­dren and what­ever else goes along with it? Is he going to Chicago? What if he likes small-town Wells County life? What if he wants five acres on the edge of town and a Rotary Club mem­ber­ship? Is he ever going to be com­pletely com­fort­able in his skin? I don’t know. Prob­a­bly not. My guess is, he’ll head to Chicago a few week­ends a year, on busi­ness, and cruise the parks. I think the closet will always be with us. I think all we can do is make it smaller.

OK, then. I front-load my week: Mon­day is the busiest, de-escalating until Fri­day, when I try to take a lit­tle me time. But lately it’s been a full-speed blowout through Thurs­day, and pals? It is get­ting on my last damn nerve. So let’s cut to the blog­gage before I hop to the shower:

“Scream 4″ wraps in Ply­mouth. I blew up that pic­ture of Court­ney Cox and was reminded of Coozledad’s descrip­tion of Madonna: “A stew bird.” Man, I’ll say.

The Andrew Bre­it­bart busi­ness yes­ter­day leaves me nearly splut­ter­ing with rage. When I get splut­tery, I turn to Roy to chan­nel it into coher­ence.

Oops, almost for­got: MRIs of veg­eta­bles. Because we can.

Me, I’m off.

Another sti­fling week­end, although it didn’t start that way. The older I get, the more I feel like all my sweat glands are rerout­ing to my head. I shlepped my first load from the East­ern Mar­ket back to the car, and could almost feel my head turn into a sprin­kler, pore by pore.

I’m sure this is yet another age-related hor­ror, but for the time being I’m choos­ing to see it as a trib­ute to my thick hair.

Or it might have been the load, which was mostly blue­ber­ries and tart cher­ries, so that pie sea­son may con­tinue in spec­tac­u­lar fash­ion. I go to a par­tic­u­lar stand for both, presided over by a man who’s a bit of a grump, but whose prod­uct is supe­rior in every way. A woman walk­ing by asked if she could try one of the tart cher­ries. He nod­ded, she popped one in her mouth, and com­menced to squeal­ing about how hor­ri­ble it was, “so sour! How could any­one eat this?!” She was older and, you’d think, of the gen­er­a­tion who might actu­ally have baked a pie with her own house­wifely hands and know the dif­fer­ence between eat­ing cher­ries (sweet) and pie cher­ries (tart), but I guess not. Thank You brand pie fill­ing has been around for a while. Thank you, Thank You, for doing your part to dimin­ish our national sup­ply of food knowl­edge.

Eh, who cares? More tart cher­ries for me, although today’s pie is blue­berry. So rich in antiox­i­dants, it’s prac­ti­cally a vit­a­min.

I haven’t writ­ten much about the Banksy busi­ness of late, mainly because I only recently learned who Banksy is (a real graf­fiti artist, as opposed to graf­fiti van­dals), and when­ever I come late to a story like this, I always fear I’m miss­ing huge chunks of the back­ground, but here goes:

Banksy did two pieces recently in Detroit, at our sto­ried Packard Plant. The aban­doned plant is usu­ally called the city’s most noto­ri­ous and cer­tainly its biggest eye­sore, at over three mil­lion decay­ing square feet. Our lit­tle gang of film­mak­ers has shot two shorts there, and it rou­tinely turns up in the national press, per­haps most mem­o­rably when a bunch of hooli­gans pushed a truck out one of its win­dows and ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Jour­nal.

Any­way, Banksy stole in, did a cou­ple paint­ings, and stole out, his usual m.o. Appar­ently, the way you find out about Banksy works is by watch­ing his web­site, where he posts pho­tographs of it in situ, with enough visual clues to tell you its loca­tion. Word was slowly get­ting around about one of them when the own­ers of a local gallery arrived with jack­ham­mers and other heavy equip­ment, and phys­i­cally removed the entire wall, tak­ing its half-ton bulk back to the gallery, where it’s on pub­lic view. They said their con­cern was that the work be pre­served, that sit­ting out in the law­less Packard site, it was only a mat­ter of time before some­one painted over it or oth­er­wise defaced it. And since peo­ple have been steal­ing the plants in bits and pieces for years, it didn’t seem like much of a crime.

(Edi­to­r­ial aside from an admit­ted art moron: Isn’t that part of the point with graf­fiti? Its imper­ma­nence? Banksy is miles beyond your local bone­head tag­gers, but he still oper­ates like one. There have prob­a­bly been hun­dreds of Banksy pieces cov­ered by build­ing own­ers who didn’t like what he’d done to their prop­erty. I know he’s now famous and chic, but …what­ever.)

The gallery own­ers say they never intended to sell it, just to pre­serve it, and so far, they’ve been true to their word.

Now comes a party with a law­suit, claim­ing own­er­ship and say­ing gimme back my Banksy. But here’s where it gets weird:

Biore­source Inc. sued 555 Non­profit Stu­dio and Gallery on Tues­day, ask­ing a judge to force it to return a mural by famed graf­fiti artist Banksy that it removed from the plant. In the law­suit, Biore­source Inc. claimed it owns the Packard Plant and that Romel Casab is the company’s pres­i­dent.

Casab has been rumored to be owner of the plant for years. But prior to the law­suit, the only owner or agent of Biore­source on record was Dominic Cristini, who is in prison in Cal­i­for­nia on Ecstasy charges.

Talk about OID! For years now, I’ve been dri­ving guests past that place, strug­gling to answer the inevitable ques­tion, “Why doesn’t some­one tear it down?” At first I assumed the plant, obvi­ously aban­doned and pre­sum­ably in tax for­fei­ture, was owned by the city, which couldn’t afford to demol­ish it. (It would cost mil­lions and mil­lions.) I knew there had been until recently one busi­ness, Biore­source, oper­at­ing out of a small part of it, and I once saw Casab referred to as its owner, but I didn’t know until now that the plant’s legal own­er­ship is a mys­tery. The dis­pute over one painted wall has flushed out some­one will­ing to be the owner of record, with all that implies — respon­si­bil­ity for doing some­thing to a dan­ger­ous hive of law­less­ness and anar­chy.

So far, the strat­egy seems to be: Allow the place to be over­run with arson­ists, scrap­pers and all man­ner of crazy Detroit types, and maybe, in time, it’ll just fall down, and the earth will reclaim it.

My guess is, noth­ing will be set­tled by this law­suit. But if it leads to any­thing impor­tant down the road, I’d say that was a con­se­quence even Banksy couldn’t have pre­dicted.

See, art does mat­ter.

Any more blog­gage? Oh, a lit­tle:

Lance Man­nion went to the post office and got into a chat with some LaRouch­ies. Do you know what Lyn­don LaRouche’s mid­dle name is? Hermyle. Now you know.

Finally, a note of con­do­lence to my friend and old radio co-host Mark GiaQuinta, whose father Ben died yes­ter­day at Mark’s Fort Wayne home at 87. While this obit has some nice moments — Ben was a state leg­is­la­tor for some years — I think I’ll pre­fer the Face­book notes Mark has started post­ing, promis­ing more in the days lead­ing up to his Sat­ur­day funeral. From today’s, about his expe­ri­ence in World War II. His com­pany was fight­ing around a Ger­man town called Welz in Novem­ber 1944, in what sounds like the runup to the Bat­tle of the Bulge. They had taken the town and cleared out some snipers and Ger­man 88s when some­thing else hap­pened:

As dad stood on a ridge out­side the Welz and over­look­ing a road, he spot­ted a wounded Ger­man writhing in pain from his injuries. Dad then saw a jeep with an Amer­i­can army medic. Some­how he got the atten­tion of the jeep dri­ver and was able to point to the wounded Ger­man who was unable to rise from his fallen posi­tion. The jeep stopped and the medic and dri­ver attended to the Ger­man sol­dier, lifted him to the jeep and drove him away. Just a few min­utes later, and directly in front of where dad stood, some­thing quite dra­matic occurred. The door of a cam­ou­flaged pill box (a con­crete bunker hold­ing a machine gun crew with a small slit for the gun tur­ret) opened and out came the Ger­man sol­diers with their hands up. With them were a num­ber of women and chil­dren who had been hid­ing in the pill box.

The Ger­mans, hav­ing seen the humane treat­ment offered to their com­rade, decided to sur­ren­der to dad and his bud­dies. Had dad not seen the sol­dier, those in the pill box and cer­tainly some of the Amer­i­cans advanc­ing toward it would likely have been killed. Think of the changes that have occurred in our lives as the result of dad’s instinct to direct the sav­ing of the wounded enemy sol­dier. Of course, we will never know what this meant with respect to the Ger­mans and oth­ers, but dad prob­a­bly saved his own life that day. I and my won­der­ful broth­ers and sis­ters can look at lov­ing spouses, our beau­ti­ful sons and daugh­ters, and the lives we have been blessed to share with each other and say thank you dad. Your instinct to help another human being gave us each other. We saw that drive to help oth­ers many times in the years we had you with us.

Some­times the most impor­tant shots in any bat­tle are the ones you don’t fire.

Off to start another crazy week. Here’s hop­ing you enjoy yours.

The heat, or maybe the cal­en­dar, has brought grack­les to the yard. My bird­watch­ing is pretty casual, but I asso­ciate flocks of grack­les with with­er­ing sum­mer days. We’re going on a sec­ond week with­out rain, so with water in short sup­ply, they’ve turned our bird­bath into their pri­vate spa, strolling around the dri­ve­way nearby and scar­ing off any­thing smaller, except for a few cheeky robins, who are closer to their size.

And I do mean strolling. These birds don’t hop so much as walk. They are a motor­cy­cle gang. They prob­a­bly have tat­toos under their feath­ers. Mean­while, the goldfinches stay away, and even the wrens, my chatty lit­tle bud­dies, seem to have moved a few yards away.

The grack­les alter­nate great splashy baths with for­ag­ing through the ground cover for their tra­di­tional diet of crap on the ground. Of course, that’s not all they eat, and I feel for­tu­nate to have seen the dis­play described in that link, more for­tu­nate still to have read LAMary’s off­hand com­ment on it:

Grack­les never look sweet in illus­tra­tions. Ever. I know a very nice per­son named Robin. If some­one was named Grackle, they would likely have a job gassing pup­pies at the pound.

Grackle’s sec­ond in com­mand at the pound would be Heck­uva J. Brownie, an idiot man­child. That’s one of my new favorite phrases, hav­ing turned up in a recent rewatch­ing of “Bar­ton Fink.” Audrey lays out the secrets of screen­writ­ing for Bar­ton, in this case a B pic­ture fea­tur­ing wrestlers:

Well, usu­ally, they’re . . . sim­ply moral­ity tales. There’s a good wrestler, and a bad wrestler whom he con­fronts at the end. In between, the good wrestler has a love inter­est or a child he has to pro­tect. Bill would usu­ally make the good wrestler a back­woods type, or a con­vict. And some­times, instead of a waif, he’d have the wrestler pro­tect­ing an idiot man­child. The stu­dio always hated that. Oh, some of the scripts were so . . . spir­ited!

Boy, you can tell I slept badly last night, can’t you? I’ve kicked the ther­mo­stat up a degree, so the cen­tral air doesn’t have to work quite so hard. It still works very hard, but I woke up before 7 a.m. with no chance of fur­ther slum­ber. Ah, mid­dle age.

Or, given that I spend the hours before bed­time chas­ing down news, it might be that I was sim­ply dis­turbed by cur­rent events. Like this story. Man hands on mis­ery to man, it deep­ens like a coastal shelf:

FARIDPUR, Bangladesh — When­ever Bangladeshi brothel owner Rokeya, 50, signs up a new sex worker she gives them a course of steroid drugs often used to fat­ten cat­tle.

For older sex work­ers, tablets work well, said Rokeya, but for younger girls of 12 to 14 — who are nor­mally sold to the brothel by their fam­i­lies — injec­tions are more effec­tive.

“It’s the quick­est way to make a girl plump and hide her actual age if she is just a teenager,” Rokeya said, adding that the drug, called Oradexon, is cheap and widely avail­able.

There’s some­thing a lit­tle smelly about the story, how­ever, which speaks of users becom­ing addicted. You can’t get addicted to steroids, can you? They can screw up your body and mind some­thing fierce, but addic­tion? Meh.

So, as we seem to have already cut to the blog­gage, here’s a lit­tle more:

Crim­i­nals, when dis­pos­ing of your guns, do your­self a favor and throw your iPhone in there, too. I once found a woman’s DayRun­ner lying on the side­walk while walk­ing the dog. I took it home and used all my pow­ers to find its owner, via the advanced inves­ti­ga­tion tech­nique of look­ing her up in the phone book. Dis­con­nected. So I started comb­ing through it for an address, and learned so much about her, just from the notes to her­self, that it sort of scared me. She had an elderly par­ent. She was look­ing for work. The phone dis­con­nec­tion was maybe con­nected to a sticky note near the back, with the title of a bank­ruptcy self-help book. There was also a bill in there, with an address, and I dropped it in her mail­box the next day. I don’t think I wanted to look her in the eye.

If any­one ever found my phone, I’d be done for — cal­en­dar, con­tacts, games, text mes­sages, e-mail, even my secret guilty music plea­sures, all there for any­one to see. They should call them dumb­phones.

How hot is it where you are? Eighty-six here, and it’s not even 11 yet.

But it’s past 10. Time to go, with apolo­gies for aggra­vated lame­ness.

One of the fun­ni­est pas­sages in “True Con­fec­tions,” fea­tured on the night­stand a few months back, con­cerned the dis­as­trous intro­duc­tion of a white-chocolate prod­uct to a small, family-owned candy company’s long-established line. It begins with a candy trade-show encounter with the prod­ucts of Green & Black, a choco­latier of which I’d never heard.

The author, Katharine Weber, throws in a lot of real candy brands in the course of her story, I assume for verisimil­i­tude. But the line at the cen­ter of it is entirely fic­tional, so I wasn’t sure about Green & Black. I eat plenty of choco­late, but until recently — until read­ing “True Con­fec­tions,” in fact — I have stayed away from most candy bars. It’s a ter­ri­ble vice for a stuck, non-smoking writer to be near vend­ing machines, and I overindulged when I still had an office job. Of course I make excep­tions for the usual Halloween/Easter events. Not to do so would be wrong.

But I’ve dis­cov­ered what prob­a­bly every­body does, even­tu­ally — two or three squares of really good dark choco­late is more sat­is­fy­ing after a meal than a piece of cake, and has fewer calo­ries, too.

Any­way, the “True Con­fec­tions” nar­ra­tive goes on at some length about Green & Black’s white choco­late bar. Rap­tur­ous length, in fact — its tex­ture and strong vanilla fla­vor and so on. And so, last week, when we stopped for the night in Toronto en route to Mon­treal, I had the strongest pos­si­ble endorse­ment fresh in my mem­ory when I stopped in to a lit­tle gro­cery in search of a news­pa­per and found a check­out dis­play of Green & Black choco­late bars. They exist! They come in a mil­lion dif­fer­ent fla­vors! And there, right there in front of me, was the sto­ried white-chocolate vari­ety. News­pa­per for­got­ten, I snatched up a 100-gram bar and tucked it into my purse.

We didn’t eat it until the next day. But it didn’t last long. It was too irre­sistible, too easy to break off square after square, place it on your tongue, and let its creamy vanil­latude melt in your mouth. Weber points out that too much white choco­late is chalky and overly sweet, but this had just the right pro­por­tions of every­thing.

I saved the label and hit the web­site when we got home, and was amazed to dis­cover it’s avail­able at Kroger, Tar­get, Mei­jer and other run-of-the-mill stores. Where have you been all my life, Green & Black? When I vis­ited Tar­get, I learned where: Hid­ing behind the better-known Lindt and Godiva and Ghi­radelli, that’s where. Tar­get only had two vari­eties, the orig­i­nal dark and the newest — peanut. My guess is, G&B doesn’t have the cash for big-time slot­ting fees at places like Kroger. My search will go on, and I believe I’ll only have to travel as far as the near­est gourmet gro­cery.

Mean­while, while we’re talk­ing books and things I didn’t know about until recently, I have to say that until the ridicu­lous and widely mocked trailer for Glenn Beck’s new “book,” I didn’t even know such a thing existed — trail­ers for books, that is. Excerpts, sure. Not videos. So I apol­o­gize for being late to the party, but it’s a plea­sure to offer this one, for Laura Lippman’s own upcom­ing release, “I’d Know You Any­where:”

The book doesn’t drop (as the hip-hopper say) until August 17th, but I just spent some Ama­zon bucks to pre-order it through my store, Nance’s Kick­back Lounge, and if you’re plan­ning to do the same, well, I thanks you.

Now I have Laura’s and Mar­tin Cruz Smith’s new nov­els to look for­ward to in August. Get outta my way, other lazy bums.

Blog­gage? OK:

Christo­pher Hitchens has can­cer. Sad news for any­one, and the sec­ond throat-area can­cer diag­no­sis I’ve heard this week, the other being Mike Harden, my for­mer Colum­bus Dis­patch col­league and, like Hitchens, another long-time smoker. Smok­ing is only one risk fac­tor for esophageal can­cer, which Hitchens has. Another is drink­ing, two activ­i­ties Hitchens has excelled at for years. I know he’s unpop­u­lar in many lefty cir­cles, but let’s not go there, OK?

Alan is per­plexed by this story, and wants some­one to explain it to him. As near as he can tell, it’s about a hip­ster doo­fus who dec­o­rates axes and sells them to other hip­ster doo­fuses, and if there’s more to it than that, please send up a flare.

We haven’t had an OID (only in Detroit) story for a while, so here’s one: The act­ing super­in­ten­dent, the woman who blew the whis­tle on the board pres­i­dent for fondling him­self in front of her dur­ing their meet­ings, didn’t have her con­tract renewed. But the board pres­i­dent was charged. For “mis­con­duct in office.” I’ll say.

And with that, it’s off to work. A good one to all.

A motorist pulled up next to me while I was rid­ing my bike the other day to say she found me “dif­fi­cult to see.” I was wear­ing a black top and beige shorts — mono­chrome, c’est moi — and I could see her point. So yes­ter­day I put on a pink top and headed out to Tar­get for some exer­cise gear in col­ors to induce eye­ball hem­or­rhage.

My local Tar­get is in a mall that is becom­ing increas­ingly racially seg­re­gated, and I’m not the race it’s select­ing for. That means the local Macy’s has a men’s millinery depart­ment, but it can be dif­fi­cult to find a jean skirt for Kate that doesn’t say BABY PHAT across the butt. How­ever, it has a Lowe’s, Home Depot, Sears and Tar­get, so we spend a good deal of cash there.

I quickly iden­ti­fied the bright-eyes tops and snagged two, one of which makes my com­plex­ion look like I’m in the last stages of a ter­ri­ble liver dis­ease, but this isn’t intended to flat­ter. I wan­dered over toward the skin emol­lients and was drawn into the orbit of a woman in the uni­form of the U.S. Postal Ser­vice, hav­ing a very loud con­ver­sa­tion on her Blue­tooth:

“Well, that’s some BULL­shit, then, because we’re get­ting three GPS errors a block on that sys­tem. …uh huh…uh huh…I’m telling you, until you get out there, you don’t know what I’m talk­ing about, but it’s the truth.” Her tone was deci­sive edg­ing into bel­liger­ence; who in the world was she talk­ing to? Surely not her boss. A union rep? A col­league?

“You don’t know that because you never been a clerk. I’ve been a clerk! I know what it’s like!”

Who­ever was on the other end had bet­ter be lis­ten­ing, because I believed every word she said. Eaves­drop­ping is one of my favorite things to do, and I rec­om­mend it to any­one who aspires to put words in another’s mouth. Of course, no one eaves­drops like Lance Man­nion. Read and imi­tate.

And that’s pretty much all I did yes­ter­day, other than writewritewrite. I don’t like to self-pimp, but here’s some­thing I wrote yes­ter­day, for the other site I run, on a topic that increas­ingly inter­ests me these days — what is to become of our pub­lic insti­tu­tions as pub­lic money falls short of sus­tain­ing them. The solu­tion reached in Grosse Pointe schools isn’t per­fect, but it’s a pretty big step for­ward, at a time when many munic­i­pal­i­ties and school dis­tricts around here are still wring­ing their hands. In the Pointes, many are still fight­ing over tax increases that trans­late to lower tax bills, i.e., raise the mill­age while prop­erty val­ues are falling, which means a lower tax bill, but not quite as much as if rates were left alone. Some of the rhetoric is ugly, and sug­gests some won’t be happy until every employee who draws a pay­check from the pub­lic is liv­ing on bread and water. Any­way, what I mainly want to do is pimp a really good “This Amer­i­can Life” episode we lis­tened to en route home from Canada, “Social Con­tract,” which was sort of the inspi­ra­tion for my col­umn.

And which leads us into the blog­gage:

Elena Kagan, funny lady: Where were you on Christ­mas day, Ms. Kagan? “You know, like all Jews, I was prob­a­bly at a Chi­nese restau­rant.”

I swear I saw a clas­si­fied ad once for three pairs of men’s under­wear, “like new.” I was not sur­prised to find u-trou on a list of 20 things you should never buy used, but on the other hand, do you have to tell peo­ple this? And who in their right mind buys used makeup?

Rod Blago­je­vich hates Carol Marin.

Finally, the mir­a­cle man, Mark Bittman, does it again — fol­low­ing last summer’s hugely pop­u­lar 101 sal­ads fea­ture, here’s 101 foods to grill. With delicious-looking pic­tures. I know what I’m doing for the rest of the sum­mer.

It’s a per­fectly lovely morn­ing here, the last few days’ oppres­sive humid­ity blown off, the sun gleam­ing, the air deli­ciously cool. So you know what that means:

The peo­ple across the street are hav­ing some trees trimmed this morn­ing. Yes, a wood chip­per. I am going insane.

This is the down­side of work-at-home self-employment. Well, that and the lousy money, and the lack of health insur­ance, and no one to bat ideas around with. I could prob­a­bly think of a few more, but, well — the wood chip­per just fired up again.

Sorry. I shouldn’t com­plain.

Hav­ing a bit of dif­fi­culty get­ting started this a.m. Or rather, I got started pretty early on other stuff, and can’t shift my head into blog­space. It seemed I missed a lot in my absence, includ­ing the whole Weigel thing, which I still can’t quite wrap my head around. The Wash­Post hires a blog­ger to cover the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, encour­ages a blog­ging voice, and then pushes him out when he becomes, what? A lit­tle too blo­ga­li­cious? Because he trashed Matt Drudge? In writ­ing? Well, OK. I get it. You can’t go around mak­ing smart cracks of the sort peo­ple make every day, at least not in writ­ing. Because that would prove…something, I dunno.

For the record: I’m in favor of a more open exchange of ideas and even insults. If that means a lot of “biased” peo­ple get to keep their jobs, then so be it. I liked Weigel’s columns while they lasted. Have we fig­ured out who dimed him? I’m still catch­ing up, but this…

“It seems like he spends a lot of time apol­o­giz­ing,” said Penny Nance, the chief exec­u­tive of Con­cerned Women for Amer­ica, one of Weigel’s con­ser­v­a­tive crit­ics. “The prob­lem is Con­cerned Women for Amer­ica and other con­ser­v­a­tives resent the idea of the Wash­ing­ton Post or other major news affil­i­ates hir­ing peo­ple who hate us to be the ones to report on us. David Weigel has already shown great dis­taste, if not down­right dis­dain, for con­ser­v­a­tives, so it’s dif­fi­cult for us to take the Post seri­ously when this is the per­son the Post hires to cover con­ser­v­a­tives.”

…caught my eye. In other words, we want to approve who cov­ers us. The line for ring-kissing forms to the left. I can’t add more than Scott Lemieux at LGM, so I won’t.

And with that, I think I’d best get back to work. We’re obvi­ously off the rails here. Apolo­gies, and I’ll try to come to the table with a lit­tle more sentence-crafting savvy tomor­row.

I was sit­ting in the midst of Bitches Brew Revis­ited, one of the opening-night con­certs at the Mon­treal Jazz Fes­ti­val — excuse me, the Fes­ti­val Inter­na­tional de Jazz de Mon­tréal — when it occurred to me why jazz is so pop­u­lar here: Because French Cana­di­ans are basi­cally French, and the French can be reli­ably counted on to embrace any­thing most Amer­i­cans hate. It makes them feel supe­rior. Per­haps they are supe­rior. They’ve cer­tainly got the charming-city thing fig­ured out. “Bitches Brew,” I’m not so sure. There are moments in that record that feel like genius, oth­ers more like the emperor’s new clothes. That’s when your mind wan­ders.

So I’m start­ing a list: Things the French Love that (Most) Amer­i­cans Hate. So far: Mod­ern jazz, sweet­breads, politi­cians with wan­der­ing peck­ers. Let’s leave Jerry Lewis off for now. Dig deeper.

And yes, we had a fine time in Mon­treal. You are free to dis­agree with my con­tention that French Cana­di­ans are “basi­cally French.” I’m aware that to a Parisian, a French Cana­dian is a knuckle-dragging, fur hat-wearing lum­mox. A for­mer edi­tor of mine was French Cana­dian on his mother’s side and spoke the lan­guage, and told me a story once of rid­ing in a taxi from the Paris air­port, chat­ting up the dri­ver, who com­pli­mented him on his grace­ful usage while simul­ta­ne­ously dis­parag­ing those block­head Canucks who mas­sacre it every day in his taxi, and… Sud­denly this is sound­ing very much like a taxi story, I real­ize.

What­ever. I did enjoy being immersed in a dif­fer­ent lan­guage for a few days, because it reminds you both of how very much you know and how very much you don’t know. I pointed out to Kate sev­eral times that fak­ing it through a for­eign coun­try isn’t so hard, that much of it is non-verbal puzzle-solving and other tricks. The ele­va­tor but­ton for the hotel lobby says R instead of L, but it’s noth­ing you can’t fig­ure out. Besides, it’s so amus­ing. The Lonely Planet guide said that even in France, stop signs are red, octag­o­nal and say STOP, but in Que­bec, they’re red, octag­o­nal and say ARRET. Still, if you know the red octa­gon part, you can fig­ure out the rest. And it’s fun to speak fake French, and spec­u­late on why it’s the lan­guage of diplo­macy; my the­ory is that it sounds much classier to call some­one le sac du douche than just a douchebag.

More sto­ries to come as the week wears on. For now, just this one, tran­si­tion­ing into the blog­gage: We were ques­tioned closely at the bor­der, enter­ing Canada, about our plans for the week, and whether we were going to stop in Toronto for the G20 con­fer­ence.

“The G20 is meet­ing in Toronto?” I asked. “I didn’t know that.”

“I thought, as jour­nal­ists, you would know about the half bil­lion we’ve spent on secu­rity, the anar­chist pro­tes­tors, and all the rest of it,” the guard said.

Shamed! I was shamed. To be sure, the G20 is one of those things I pay atten­tion to when it’s going on, but crim­iny, buddy, the pregame is sort of the def­i­n­i­tion of a local story. Nev­er­the­less, once we were in the Globe & Mail cir­cu­la­tion area, it was hard to avoid, and com­ing home Sat­ur­day, we stopped for din­ner in a sub­urb of the big T, and watched the vio­lence on live TV. It looked pretty bad, but I’m just going to throw this out there and see what you think:

Police love noth­ing more than expect­ing trou­ble. It gives them a big, big bar­gain­ing chip to present to their munic­i­pal­i­ties, in return for a blank check. When the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Fort Wayne, the sheriff’s deputies fell out in a long row behind a line of riot shields that were so new you could prac­ti­cally see the stickum where the price tags had been. Riot shields are not nor­mally gear the Allen County Sheriff’s Depart­ment uses, and I’m sure that was only the begin­ning. News that the world’s anar­chists are com­ing to your city is music to a cop’s ears, as it rep­re­sents huge over­time checks, hel­mets and gas masks and, for the bul­lies, a license to swing a club.

Which is not to say they wouldn’t rather be patrolling a pleas­ant sum­mer day in the park. I’m just say­ing there’s a time in every job when you’re needed, and that feels good to every­one. I’m not say­ing I agree with the con­tentions in this rather para­noid arti­cle — short ver­sion: that, in need of a rea­son to use all that new equip­ment and jus­tify its expense, that the police started their own riot — but it’s inter­est­ing to think about. The stuff about the shoes is intrigu­ing.

I don’t know what the total dam­age in Toronto will be. But if half a bil­lion in advance spend­ing couldn’t stop it, maybe a dif­fer­ent approach is called for next time.

Full-on blog­gage today:

A story for Pride 2010, via Hank: After 45 years, a wed­ding. Also, an 89-year-old Stonewall vet sits it out this year.

The Back of Town blog — the “Treme” peo­ple — gets some love.

The Texas GOP comes out against oral sex. Way to nail down the swing vote, guys.

Susan Ager came out of retire­ment to write a very long account of her recent brush with endome­trial can­cer in Sunday’s Free Press. I know the lady had — has — a lot of fans, but I was rarely one of them. She didn’t even rank on the Albom Scale of Irri­ta­tion, but she could get on my nerves. I can take or leave Sunday’s story — it’s cer­tainly bet­ter than most of what they run on that space — but can I just say some­thing? When I was a colum­nist, I got a cer­tain amount of fan mail, and it wasn’t all from Brian Stouder. But when I pub­lished reader let­ters, I cut that stuff out. If some­one wrote me a let­ter, told me how much they liked my col­umn and then com­menced to ask a ques­tion about some­thing else, I cut right to the ques­tion. So when I read stuff like this…

(The sur­geon) smiled at my bed­side and said, “You’re meet­ing me for the first time, but I’ve known you for years through your work.”

…I cringe. What hap­pened to self-effacement? There was a Det­News colum­nist who did the same thing. When she was off sick, she’d come back and write a col­umn about how sick she’d been, pep­pered with reader notes about how much they’d missed her beau­ti­ful face smil­ing out of the news­pa­per. I ask you.

And now I ask you for leave, because, as usual, Mon­day is a killer.