School started today, and I’m a busy person these days, so not much from me. On today’s to-do list: Write treatment for short zombie film; track down Hollywood producer/director last seen in Michigan. I hasten to add these two jobs are unrelated. And to think I could have been a dental hygienist.

(The other day our director called to say, “I called Dan, just to pick his brain.” Ha ha ha.)

All I’m going to leave you with today is this:

Culture wars suck. It’s pointless, enervating and takes time and energy away from important matters. And yet, like gorging on potato chips and chocolate-covered peanuts, it’s hard to stay away. So when I broke my internet diet and dropped in on Rod Dreher, I wasn’t surprised to read this:

I’m listening to three young blogger-radio reporters from a lefty Canadian radio program (lots of “aboot” in the air) talk about their day. They’re on the other side of the blue curtain here, so I don’t know what they look like. One was just on the phone coordinating with “the Socialist World people.” A woman reporter from the site just joined the two guys. She’s been out reporting, and said she talked to an Evangelical about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy.

“She was really beautiful,” the woman said. “This pregnancy thing hasn’t turned them off. If anything, it’s rallying them to embrace her.” The reporter said this as if it well and truly was shocking. She wasn’t being condescending at all; she was really shocked. She spoke with the amazement of an anthropology grad student on her first dig.

Well, of course. Being foreigners, their knowledge of the United States isn’t as deep as ours, and so they assume that when people are willing to spend decades of their lives talking about teenage sluts who don’t deserve birth control and HPV vaccines (”the slut shot” — I’d never heard that charming turn of phrase before this week; thanks, Free Republic!), they might back it up when the chips are down. Stupid foreigners. Spend a little more time in this country, and you might learn a thing or two about the breathtaking hypocrisy of these folks. If Hillary Clinton really wanted to back Barack Obama, she’d cut a very simple 30-second spot right around now, laying out five random facts about Sarah Palin, and add, “Imagine what they’d be saying if I was the one who did these things.” Fade out.

I am looking forward to seeing the newest Palin son-in-law (almost) tonight, who I understand has now dropped out of high school. This story keeps getting better.

I was working last night and couldn’t give my full attention to Hillary’s speech, but I had it on in the background, and 30 percent of my attention found it impressive. Anything less than full graciousness would have been …ungracious. So now it’s time for her to exit stage right and the remainder of the convention to go into full attack mode. Eugene Robinson said on MSNBC, “Someone needs to say ‘torture’ from the podium” and oh yes they do. Plus, as The Editors say, “People, these rats ain’t going to fuck themselves.”

I’m generally not a fan of smear politics, but it’s time to win this one, and that Corsi book is sitting on top of the bestseller list like Jabba the Hutt, and so it’s time to take note: They started it.

I like Brad at Sadly No’s idea: A 527 called Values Voters Against McCain, quivering with moral indignation all over the swing states. And screw the evangelicals, who aren’t going to vote for Obama anyway; they’re just flirting with him to make their boyfriend jealous. And this needs to be flapping over the main stage in the Pepsi Center:

The captioned version:

And that would be a good start. As would other strategies.

A little bloggage? Just a little; I’m Costco-bound:

The NYT has been running recipes all summer on its Health pages, and they had me at the risotto with roasted beets and beet greens, which promises a magenta dish, and how often do you get to serve magenta food? But that one will have to be mine alone, as I live among beet haters. (”But the New York Times says they’re the new spinach!” I say. Like they care.) This is what I made for dinner Saturday — Pistou Manchego with Eggs, which is basically zucchini and tomatoes with a few eggs poached on top, plus a fancy name. Easy-peasy, good for yousy. Try it.

Thank God for Jezebel, because where else could we read a headline like this: Tyra Banks: High heels will give you a tighter vagina, better orgasms, I ask you?

Costco-bound. Tell me what you need a lot of, and I’ll pick it up for you.

Like many of you, our house has lost significant value in the last three years — maybe as much as 20 percent. Unlike many of you, we didn’t live through the run-up of the prior years, and may have actually bought at the top of the local market. Which, I regret to say, won’t be bouncing back the way it will in, say, Scottsdale. So, barring a piece of spectacularly good financial luck, we’re stuck here until the police find our mummified corpses at spring thaw at some date in the future.

What do you do with a house that’s not performing like a piggy bank? Pour more money into it, that’s what.

We’re in the first, early, just-looking-thanks stages of a kitchen remodel, the stage where I wonder if this can be done for a four-figure sum, occasionally say so aloud, and watch people laugh in my face. The first Kitchen Guy is coming this morning to give us a look-see, make some suggestions, and laugh in my face. He’s the very high-end guy, and yes, Ikea will be asked to weigh in at some point, too. (From them, I expect merely a discreet giggle.) We went to the high-end guy’s showroom yesterday, and wasn’t that something, touring all those showroom alcoves of dream kitchens, some of which the Shah of Iran would think himself unworthy to occupy. A friend of mine is a caterer, and from her, I’ve learned something important about kitchens: The fancier the kitchen, the less likely it is used by actual human beings. Or, as she puts it:

“The first thing you learn in catering is, if the kitchen is really fabulous, bring your own knives. Because you’ll be lucky to find a paring knife.”

Doesn’t that make you feel good about America? Tens of thousands spent on a room that only requires a fridge, microwave and a telephone for ordering takeout? There was a stove in the showroom, an oh-my-gaw stove, six burners and a grill and two ovens, with an instrument panel worthy of a 757, and all I could think is, “It’ll boil water and twice a year be fired up to reheat the pre-cooked turkey and ham, and someone else will own it and life isn’t fair.”

Nope, it sure ain’t.

So I have to go tidy up a bit. Let’s talk convention. I missed much of last night’s hoo-ha, but I caught the Michelle and Kennedy highlight reels, and thought they did great. How credible is the assassination plot, do you think? I’ll be back after I hand the kitchen guy a tissue to wipe away his tears of helpless laughter.

I don’t want you to think I’m obsessed with roller coasters, because I’m not. But I took this video, so what the hell. This is the Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point, a ride that lasts less than 30 seconds. They stretch it out with some recorded engine rumbling at the beginning and run the little Christmas tree lights, but it’s very simple — you’re blasted out of the gate, reach 120 mph in four seconds and climb 420 feet in the air, over the top and then 420 feet back down — straight down — with a little corkscrew twist thrown in, just in case you haven’t peed your pants yet.

Occasionally, when the track isn’t warm enough, it won’t make it over the top and returns to the station in reverse. This is called a “rollback” and is highly prized by insane coaster fanatics, who try to time their rides to get one — after a rain is a good time to be first in line. And in one terrifying case, it had the precise amount of momentum to make it to the top, and no further. In that case, they send a worker up in a basket to give it a push.

Some of you guys who share my coaster problems mentioned motion sickness. Not my problem — I’m a chicken about heights. And an experience like that? Being stuck? I would lay lie flat on the ground after disembarking, and I would probably still be there.

I went to high school with this guy named…I’m going blank. Bill? Bob? Something like that. Bill/Bob was in the class ahead of me, 1974, but finished in 1975. In his senior year, he started playing euchre in the student lounge and smoking area. (Yes, smoking area. Hello, I am old.) And he started down a dangerous path, paved with 24 cards, the 9 through the ace. He couldn’t stop.

He started skipping class to play euchre. The players came and went, but he would deal and play with any and all comers. I played him many times, but I never skipped class to do so. When players left, others would take their place. To say he was single-minded about it was an understatement; he just dealt and played, dealt and played, until the final bell rang.

I don’t know why someone didn’t stage an intervention with him. Maybe someone did, but it didn’t take. When he showed up for class in the fall, months after he was supposed to graduate, I asked what happened.

“I got euchred on my last trick,” he said.

Those of you reading this outside the midwest may not understand the lure of euchre, but trust me, it is strong. It’s a simple game that anyone can play, but rewards experience and a certain amount of strategy; in other words, perfectly suited for a 17-year-old mind. You doubtless have something like it in your part of the country, but that’s not what I want to talk about today. I’m thinking about addiction, and the computer’s role in it.

Many years later, there was a woman at the News-Sentinel who couldn’t stop playing Windows solitaire. Two women, actually, and one of them was me, but I was limited by not having it on my primitive, DOS-based computer. I had to go to Leo Morris’ office to play, but play I did. Both of us did. When I quit smoking, it replaced cigarettes as my favorite tool of procrastination. In the old days, I’d write a few grafs, lean back and light a cigarette, regarding my prose through a few puffs, then stub it out and write some more. Replace the cigarette with getting up and sauntering down to Leo’s office, where I’d wave him aside — he’d usually go outside to smoke, having failed to conquer that addiction — and play until he came back, sometimes longer. We’d run up the wins/losses in dollar figures and pretend we were getting rich off our mad solitaire skilz. Eventually, though, he’d have to write an editorial, and I’d go back to my cubicle and feel grateful my computer didn’t have Windows, because that’s some dangerous shit, that solitaire.

The other woman had Windows, and lo, she was weak. She played for hours, and I know because I could recognize the telltale mouse movements, the way a junkie knows which guy in the park is the connect. She had an office, too, and could angle her screen slightly so no one could see just how many times she was dealing herself a new hand, except of course everyone knew. (Her output didn’t match the keyboard hours she was putting in.) When the time came for the newsroom to lose an FTE, the editor in chief chose her department to take the loss, and further decided the solitaire addict was a fine candidate for the copy desk, a plain and humiliating demotion. It did cure her solitaire problem, but it sort of wrecked her newspaper career, although she landed on her feet in local government, where for all I know she’s still playing.

Procrastination is one of the two great temptations for writers. (The other: Alcohol.) Go have a cigarette. Make a phone call. Take a walk around the block. Feign writer’s block. Anything but confronting that blank screen. I once read someone’s theory about why the O.J. Simpson trial got so big so fast, and it was refreshing, having nothing to do with brown skin or blonde hair. The writer speculated that the case built buzz because Los Angeles is full of screenwriters avoiding their work, who instead expended their energies watching the trial, e-mailing one another about the trial, spinning alternate theories about the culpability of the various players, etc. It made perfect sense to me.

But computer games may be the stickiest quicksand of all. Almost all writers work at a computer. Almost all computers come with some sort of game. It’s like holding AA meetings in a bar. When we had our first iMac, it came with a game called Bugdom, and Kate and I played it together. When I started it in the presence of John and Sam, our friends from Atlanta, both shuddered and turned away. “What’s wrong?” I asked, only to be told that the music had bad associations for both of them; it’s “the sound of Sammy not writing her dissertation,” John said.

(She got her dissertation written, but it went down to the wire. She’s Dr. Sam now.)

Anyway, I guess my point is, I’ve been thinking about how quickly any behavior can become compulsive, and why it does. I suppose Bill/Bob was using euchre as a way to avoid the rest of his senior year. I know I was using Windows solitaire to avoid writing. I’ve noticed that even when I have a deadline, I rarely miss a day of blogging, so blogging is obviously a replacement for solitaire — it’s writing that allows me to avoid other writing, and isn’t that quite the trick.

In getting to know the iPhone, I’ve downloaded two games from the App Store — Jawbreaker, a form of Bejeweled/Bubbles, where you pop contiguous circles; and Peg Jump, an electronic version of the golf-tee game in every Cracker Barrel on the interstate. Neither one is addictive. Yet. Jawbreaker is my favorite, but so far it’s no Windows solitaire. I limit myself to 10 games at a stretch, and so far have kept my vow. But you never know. There are times I think I should just start smoking again; maybe I’d get more work done.

A bit of bloggage:

Observers of the hackneyed prose style of Mitch Albom know one of his favorite tricks is the Dramatic Repetition, singling out one phrase and repeating it every five grafs, usually set off by itself. It’s an old trick and not a very effective one, but he’s very proud of it, and uses it in most of his columns. When I saw he was writing about Michael Phelps yesterday, I imagined, Carnack-like, what the phrase would be, and whaddaya know, I guessed it on the nose. See if you can, too. No fair peeking. I’ll post the answer later in the day. P.S. It’s an obvious one.

They say the days after Halloween are battle-stations, no-vacation-days-for-anyone times in orthodontists’ offices, when kids who promised not to endanger their braces with taffy and chewing gum come a cropper. In the UK, something called the Gadget Helpline is dealing with a number of calls (story’s unclear on how many, the sure sign of a b.s. trend story, but what the hell) from people wanting to adjust their stationary bikes and ergometers — rowing machines — to match the pace of Great Britain’s Olympians. Of course, the story winds up with the duh quote, from a physiologist from the English Institute of Sport:

“It’s great that people are being inspired by the Games and the performances taking place across different sports, but each individual needs to know their limits. To avoid injuring yourself by overstretching, setting smaller targets for performance improvements in your fitness regime would be the best start in improving your exercise rates, whether that’s on the rowing machine, bike or on the treadmill.”

And don’t forget the sunscreen. Come back later and see if you scored in the Write Like Mitch competition.

The Mother of the Year is traveling this morning and will be filing later in the day from the Roller Coaster Capital of the World. No, I’m not braving the Millennium Force. But I figure I can give you some pictures of the tattoos and pudge on the midway. Later, dudes.

Tonight? Blueberry:

As my BFF Deb says, “The only thing wrong with cake is, it’s not pie.”

UPDATE: This was a very good pie, but not my favorite. The recipe came from Rose Levy Berenbaum, a source above reproach. The crust was pre-baked, and the filling was a trick I’ve not seen before — cook one cup of berries with water, sugar, lemon juice and cornstarch, then fold the rest in, fill and wait for it to cool and set. This produces a pie with a firm filling and a lovely, glistening topside, and nothing runs into the gap when you cut a piece. However, I think I’m returning to the two-crust variety — I like a thoroughly baked fruit-pie filling, m’self.

But we’re talking about blueberry pie here. There really aren’t any bad ones.

A mostly photo post today, because I’m lazy.

On Saturday I went kayaking. I’m sort of on an exercise binge, at least to the extent that I’m capable. A true exercise binger would have been undaunted by the brisk wind from the west, and would have dug in and headed out to the shipping channel for a quick there-and-back, damn the rollers, but not me. I stayed in the canals and collected data for my eventual master’s thesis on boat naming.

You can make a study of these things. Once upon a time boats were named for monarchs (Queen Mary), nobler ideas (Courage, Intrepid) or people who’d earned the privilege (Edmund Fitzgerald, Harry S. Truman). These aren’t names you’ll see in your local marina, unless you live in Liverpool or Norfolk or some such. For the average boat-owning American, naming the vessel is less high-minded and more fun, an occasion that calls for all the creativity they can muster. Like most creativity, though, it’s kind of predictable, and tends to fall into broad categories. Most common is puns and wordplay:

Some boaters can’t get over how the first two syllables in “nautical” make a homophone of “naughty.” People drink beer on boats and wear brief swimwear; naughtiness is frequently uppermost in mind. Also, basic facility with lines and knots is a requirement of the job, and so “knotty” is sometimes deployed in its place. We had a boat docked nearby our first year called the Knotty Lady, with the name spelled out in a font that looked like ropes. Alan once overheard the owner’s wife saying, “It says on our contract that if the boat isn’t removed from the water by November 1, they’ll do it for you. Isn’t that nice of them?” Perhaps Dumb Lady would have been more appropriate.

Bertram is a big manufacturer of motor yachts. I don’t think this is one of them:

More wordplay. It says something about the world of boating that you can drive around in a vehicle with a giant advertisement on the back saying, essentially, “There’s a good chance I’m drunk.” For the record, the law of the Michigan sea says you can drink aboard, but you can’t operate while drunk. Imagine driving down the highway, knowing you can legally raise a bottle in salute to a passing cop, as long as you won’t blow .08. (The funniest car-accident photo I ever saw was from a small paper in Indiana, showing a beater that had run off the road. Emblazoned across its trunk lid: “Daved and confused.” Go Dave!)

Many boat owners, in choosing names for their vessels, emphasize the mental-health angle:

Walk through any marina, and you’ll find versions of this: Seaclusion, Serenity, Escape, Cool Breezes, Hakuna Matata, In Recess. (The more jargon a job has, the more likely it’ll turn up on a stern somewhere. Lawyers in particular are guilty of this, but I bet if we’d explored the yacht basin in Sausalito, I’m sure we would have found at least one Offline and Away Message.) Skippers like to emphasize how chill they are, which lasts until the next set of bills comes, or one hits a rock. In my time on the water, I’ve witnessed beautiful watercraft pounded into near-splinters by heedless teenagers, squabbling crew members, screaming couples, fires onboard, near-sinkings. Somehow, you never see boats named Divorce Court or Poor House. Huh.

Also, note: This is Tranquillity II. Some people only have one name in them; all over the nation’s waterways are the Three B’s IV, Gone Fishin’ III, etc. Boats are distinct from one another; this just seems wrong to me.

I’m baffled by this one:

Inside joke/reference, I guess. Maybe Christine got a palimony settlement from Andrew Lloyd Webber. Maybe she got the house in the divorce, leaving her ex with this consolation prize.

Local color plays its part. This is a terrible name for a boat:

What’s the point? It moves fast? It would fit for an iceboat, but the last thing most people want to think about during summer sailing season is the Red Wings. But then, a boat is like a little floating nation with a single monarch, who gets to have it his/her way. So there.

Another local reference. Anyone get it?

It’s a Kid Rock lyric:

Buy a yacht with a flag sayin’ chillin’ the most
Then rock that bitch up and down the coast

Kid Rock is a local hero. He’s got a big hit now (”All Summer Long”) that name-checks northern Michigan, every Mitten Stater’s favorite summer-vacation spot. In the video…

…he drives a classic mahogany speedboat, which I will bet a sawbuck is not an original but one of those jillion-dollar reproductions. My friends Paul and Mark had a boat like that, and still do. It was a Chris-Craft, named The Kid. Here it is, in a scene from a summer day much like the ones in the video, only no one is pole-dancing or displaying breast implants:

I don’t know who that girl is. She looks drunk.

Anyway, Kid Rock’s boat name in the video is also a reference to that song about chillin’ the most, but not, I’m happy to say, something like Rockin’ That Bitch. It’s just the song title: Cowboy.

Then there’s ours:

Alan’s a jazz fan. I favored this name, and suggested Kind of Blue as an alternative. I thought Boplicity would be cool (it’s a Miles Davis song), even though no one would get it, and probably pronounce it “Bopple City.” Long after our friend J.C. designed this new name for us and it was installed, Alan revealed his secret second choice: Box of Rain.

I didn’t even know he liked the Grateful Dead.

Bloggage:

Fascinating story in Sunday’s NYT magazine on trolling (the internet variety). What awful people.

That Obama-is-skinny story was made even worse over the weekend, after Maureen Dowd echoed its central premise and money quote, taken from a Yahoo politics message board. In both the WSJ and the NYT, it was reported as, “I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.”

In its full version, it reads: “Yes I think He is to skinny to be President.Hillary has a potbelly and chuckybutt I’d of Voted for Her.I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.” Hmm. The story appeared Friday, which tells me Maureen Dowd is still writing her Sunday column on Friday morning — not unheard of, certainly, but if she’s going to cut it that close, she should check the blogs first. That thing had been stripped by piranhas by noon.

Can I just say that few things drive me as insane as people who write “I’d of voted for…?” It’s my “supposebly.”

And that’s it for today. Monday. Another one. Sigh.

It was perhaps foolish to take a weightlifting class on the same day I’m restricted to a clear-liquid diet, but oh well. I’m already hungry, and the zero hour isn’t for another 20. Sigh. Gonna be a long day.

I briefed Kate on mom’s upcoming procedure, and she thinks it’s simply hilarious. “You have to drink ALL THAT? And it has LAXATIVES in it?” Then she falls out laughing, perhaps at the joy of being 11 years old and 39 years away from her first routine colonoscopy. Who can blame her? And speaking of being 50 and having an 11-year-old daughter, thanks to LAMary for passing along some handy visual aids to show why Hollywood stars keep Photoshop geniuses on retainer (and why the paps work so hard to get the unguarded shot). Jesus, cheek implants, Madge — whose idea was that?

Well, I hope she enjoys her colonoscopy.

As you can imagine, I’ve been thinking a lot about bowels today. (And I haven’t even started with the magic drink.) They really are a mystery to too many people. One day when Alan’s mom and Aunt Dorothy were still alive, we went to Defiance one day, only to be told, “Dorothy’s bowel is dead.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“The doctors say it’s just dead. Everything she eats, it just goes straight through her.”

I can’t recall how close this was to the decline and fall of my own parents, but it must have been close, because I snapped a little. I’d grown a little tired of calling mom and dad, asking about their latest medical appointments, and being told, essentially: [Shrug.] I don’t know if they didn’t know the questions to ask or failed to remember the answers, but their attitude was always, “Ah, well. There’s nothing to be done.” It was like living in a 19th-century novel, where people were always “in a decline,” after which they’d either take to their beds and die or visit a sanitarium and recover, but there was rarely anything more to be done.

“Well, if Dorothy’s bowel is dead, you’d all better say goodbye, because the rest of her will soon be following,” I said, a little sharper than I’d intended. “You really can’t live without a bowel.”

We saw Dorothy later that day, and while she seemed to be in some pain, her color was good and she didn’t look like a person who wasn’t digesting anything, although, once again, she claimed that anything she ate would come out the other end, more or less untouched, within minutes. I kept my self-control this time and settled for muttering, under my breath, “That’s impossible.”

Dorothy lived another decade at least. I meditated on the subject for a while. The mysteries of what happens below the navel have been a source of fascination — and money-making opportunities — for as long as we’ve been self-aware. (Warning: Much grossness at that last link. Best leave it untouched. You’ve been warned.) Dogs just sniff and, occasionally, taste. We analyze.

A couple years ago, we had a marvelous discussion here about the 37-pounds-of-impacted-feces urban legend, which is said to be the postmortem fate of either Elvis Presley or John Wayne, and turns up from time to time in places it shouldn’t. Not the celebrity angle, but the standard line peddled by the colonics industry, which I still find in publications that should know better. A few months ago, a medical magazine asked me for story ideas. I replied with a few, and added a P.S.: “By the way — the colonics story in this issue? Where the writer says that all meat eaters carry three to five pounds of mucous-covered decaying meat in their intestines? That’s not true.”

I never got an assignment from the magazine, although one of my ideas turned up under a different writer’s byline a few months later. The secrets of my success, revealed!

Anyway, here’s a line I’ve been waiting my whole life to write: By the time some of you read this, I’ll have a 17,000-foot-long tube up my butt. Try to contain your excitement.

I’ll be back when I’m able, but I don’t think I’ll be able to improve on Dave Barry’s account (HT: Jen), so let’s leave it at that, eh? Fingers crossed for pink and healthy, and a 10-year break before the next one.

Ms. Lippman claims to be on an internet diet. As she is a very disciplined person, I believe it. (I add that I’m honored she includes this site in her restricted surfing, particularly considering it has no supplemental vitamin or minerals.) What’s more, I think she’s on to something. I didn’t miss the internet (too much) during our vacation, and I’m thinking I want to be more analog for a while.

So I’m going on a diet. I will not be neglecting this site. Too much. Same daily updates, perhaps less bloggage. Maybe you won’t notice it at all, but I’m going to restrict my time spent a) blogging and b) looking for things to blog about to 45 minutes a day, 60 at most. I have a few writing opportunities I want to explore, and if the mile of tombstones* this year has reminded me of anything, it’s that we don’t have all the time in the world, just some of it. Wouldn’t it be stupid to lie on your deathbed and think, “I spent it all blogging”? I think so.

Also, I need to do more video. Even though I am unemployable by traditional media, I like to keep the skills sharp.

What I mainly think I’m going to do is stop reading the sites that bug me. While there’s a certain scab-picking satisfaction in seeing What That Idiot Has to Say Today, it’s just, alas, a waste of time. So long, Jim Lileks. Au revoir, Rod Dreher. Farewell, about a dozen other blogs. It was fun while it lasted, and besides, I’m still reading Roy, who will keep us updated on the highlights.

* turn of phrase borrowed from Thomas McGuane, who used it as the title of an essay about a rash of deaths in his family

OK, then. What a nice weekend. Spent it at Eastern Market (July! Time for corn, peaches, snow peas, bok choy, sugar snaps, tomatoes, beets, weensy little carrots and yes I made two trips to the car), sailing, moviegoing (”Journey to the Center of the Earth,” which will go on my parental-duty roster in the plus column, but otherwise be entirely forgotten in a matter of days) and, Sunday, a Tigers game. As a recent transplant, I really don’t give a crap about the Tiger Stadium demolition, despite the Free Press’ dedication to covering every swing of the wrecking ball, and besides, Comerica is hardly a dump. It was hot and sweaty in the sun, but the seats were great (thanks, Michael and Diane) and the Tigers won. Pudge Rodriguez went four-for-four — a Hot Pudge Sunday — and there were a couple of nice homers. And the heat wasn’t even that bad; fortunately, there was beer.

Friday night at the movies was something else, however — we went to the 5 p.m. show and came out in the midst of Macomb County Friday Night, a vast gathering at a new “lifestyle center” mall up in the northern ‘burbs. “Lifestyle center” = open-air. Their gimmick is, they allow dogs, and every time I go there I wonder if this will be the day disaster strikes. Because there are an awful lot of stupid people in the world, people who think dogs “enjoy” a Friday night spent strolling at the mall, in the company of hundreds of people and dozens of strange dogs, some of which are barely under control in the first place. Since we were last there the mall added an outdoor splash fountain and climbable play area, so add a bunch of toddlers to the mix, too. Every time I go there I witness at least one dog argument barely avoided, sometimes between, oh, an 80-pound boxer and a 100-pound lab, both straining at the ends of their leashes, which are held by 110-pound women who simply don’t have a clue. About anything.

Also, these trips enable me to see how many people think it is normal and admirable to put clothes on dogs. I’m not talking a bandanna around the neck, either. I ask you.

So, a little bit of bloggage:

Mitch Albom, I beg you, take the buyout. A grateful readership would thank you. I would, anyway.

And one final housekeeping note: This week is when I’m collecting the last of my doctor’s 50th-birthday presents, the one that requires a special diet, Miralax and general anesthesia. So if I disappear for a couple of days, please try not to picture what I’ll be doing. ‘kay?