Now here’s a tragedy for you: A 19-year-old Chinese freshman at Michigan State dies on orientation weekend before attending a single class. Why? Guess:

Police believe alcohol may have played a role in her death.

Really? The picture at the link is heartbreaking — so young and pretty. You have to wonder what happened. I guess we’ll find out, eventually.

I don’t have much today. It was a hot and muggy one, and tomorrow will be hotter and muggier. It’s the last week for lap swimming at the city pool, and I’m going to take advantage of it — these are perfect mornings for getting the exercise out of the way early.

OK, here’s this: Lunch and I are growing apart. Why eat lunch, anyway? To get out of the office, sure, but food wise, it’s just a big load of calories sitting in your stomach just when you need to get four more hours of work done. Today we moseyed down the block to a taco takeout joint, and I ordered the vegan naked burrito — the fillings without the tortilla. I thought it would be light and digestible, but I forgot about the red onions. Erg. An afternoon of dragon breath hardly seems worth it when you can just have a huge breakfast and do a Balance bar or something around 1 or 2 p.m. Bookend the day with calories but skip lunch, or go super-light.

Boy, I really got nothin’.

Here’s something: Judgmental Maps gets to Detroit. I live near Sailboats, but am not one with them.

Tuesday is coming for us all. Enjoy it.

I really should be cleaning my bathroom. I want that on the record. In fact, when I finish here? Cleaning that bathroom. Because hair and gunk and the usual. Sometimes I think letting our cleaning lady go was the biggest mistake I made last year, but she was a luxury and luxuries needed to be trimmed.

Besides, like so many cleaning ladies, she was starting to slip. Next time, I hire another service.

So, what a weekend. Lots of work, a little bit of cooking, and a long bike ride in Windsor, because why not? You pop through the tunnel with the bikes in the back of the car, find a park to launch from, and then…discover Windsor isn’t much of a cycling city. There were some nice parks, some decent lanes here and there, but not enough. So we rode here and there and did what everybody does in Windsor — found a good Chinese restaurant and ate dim sum, then stopped at the duty-free for some Niagara-region wine.

“I don’t know about you, but ‘Wayne Gretzky’ doesn’t do much for me on a wine label,” I told the clerk. She said “Dan Ackroyd” did even less for her.

There was also this: “Tim’s Vermeer,” a perfectly amusing little documentary about one man’s quest to duplicate a Vermeer painting, not for fraudulent reasons but just to see if he can figure out the tricks of how Vermeer managed photorealism in the 17th century.

As with great documentaries, it starts out being one thing and ends up being about something else entirely — the magic of art, mainly. On iTunes and Amazon Primenow, soon to be on Netflix, no doubt.

Have a good week, all. I’m going to watch premium-cable Sunday-night TV.

HBO is rerunning “Rome” at 8 p.m., which is frequently my blogging hour, so I sometimes have it on in the background. I’d forgotten how much I liked it when it first aired, what? Ten years ago? Awakening the day of Caesar’s funeral, Mark Antony says, “I’m not getting out of this bed until I’ve fucked someone.” His consort, Atia, says fine, and orders a slave to “fetch that German slut from the kitchen.”

I think that’s going to be today’s catch phrase: Fetch that German slut from the kitchen.

So fetch her! Here’s a story I found intriguing, from Tommy Tomlinson, an ESPN sportswriter who happens to be married to an ex-colleague of mine. He’s a fat guy, and he’s writing about another fat guy, and do so with the insight of one who not only has been there, but is still there:

He is trying to get past the chomp-chomp-chomp phase. He orders a lot of salads. He’s cut back on the steaks in favor of grilled chicken and sushi. The drink he guzzles is Diet Coke (mostly from Steak ‘n Shake, because its cups keep it coldest). But he won’t lie. He loves Jimmy John’s. And sometimes, on the way home, that $5 Little Caesars pizza calls his name.

He has trouble sleeping, and his snoring just about cracks the drywall. Stairs are starting to give him a problem, especially with his leg still healing. We see our futures, and they’re not long ones. I’m 50, and I might feel it more deeply than he does. Nobody who’s 65 looks like we do.

Most people have something in their lives that they can’t beat back with willpower alone. But when you’re fat, your problem is obvious to the world. And here’s one difference between having a problem with food and having one with cigarettes or booze or drugs: You can’t quit cold turkey. You have to eat something.

Tamara remembers times when she and Jared did really well — they ate right, exercised, even grew a little garden together. Then she’d clean the house one day and find a Little Debbie wrapper under the couch.

Changing one’s eating habits, even if they’re relatively normal, is incredibly difficult. It’s taken me nearly two years to wean myself off just the insane amounts of sugar I used to eat. And I still eat too much. So I have a lot of sympathy here.

Finally, I’m going to pimp my gentrification package one more day, in case you missed it yesterday: Main, map, sidebar. Plus guest columns one and two. You journos know the multiple-entry-points thing, right?

And now we’ve gotten to the end of the week. Enjoy your weekend. I hope that German slut from the kitchen is everything you wanted.

August is firmly established, otherwise known as the month when it’s frequently too hot, when you stop pulling every weed, when you linger on a fall sale ad and start thinking, if only vaguely, of boots. Not snow boots, cute boots, the kind you wear on a date in October. If you still go on dates. If you still think like a dating person. Whatever.

I bought a new pair of boots this fall, at Nordstrom’s annual sale. They were a great deal, and now they’re sitting in my closet, waiting for the first cool breezes, the bomb that will once and for all end summer.

But summer still has a good month to go, and a few weeks of benevolence after that. I intend to enjoy them. Eight more pounds until the Centers for Disease Control no longer considers me overweight, 10 until I reach my pre-pregnancy weight, now that the baby who resulted is about to apply to colleges. Well, they never said it would come off easily.

So. I spent a little time today watching the now-notorious sprint-car accident that killed a young driver in New York Saturday night — video embedded at this link — and all I know is, I don’t know enough. I’ve spent more time at racetracks than most women, and the very first thing I thought, when I saw the clip, was what the hell is that guy doing, stomping all over the track like a bantam rooster? I have no opinion on whether the maneuver that took him into the wall and out of the race was OK or dirty or what; that I’m not qualified to have an opinion on. But it seems incredibly foolish and hot-headed to then climb from your car and go marching off, waving your arms and pointing at the driver you think wronged you, while the race is still in progress, even under a yellow flag. What was he going to do, pull Tony Stewart from his car and punch him out? (Maybe that’s what racing has come to when I wasn’t paying attention, like those baroque moves with the stapler in “The Wrestler.”) All these stories, like the one above, referring to Stewart “running over and killing” the other driver, seem to be ignoring a very big piece of the narrative.

I know a lot of you are racing fans; feel free to discuss.

I was thinking the other day that I don’t go to nearly as many weddings as I used to. The few invitations that have arrived in recent years have been for friends’ children. At this age, unless you know the marrying couple well, your job at these things is to sit quietly, give a nice gift, don’t stay too late or hold up the receiving line and whatever you do, don’t propose any toasts. Actually, that’s not terrible advice for any age, although if you’re a close friend of the bride and groom, you can get away with a great deal more. But probably you shouldn’t go this far. (Malcolm Gladwell link; be forewarned.) Still, a funny read.

Steven Soderbergh is one of my favorite directors, and I watched the first episode of “The Knick” Friday night with optimism. This Grantland career appreciation is scarred with that plague of internet snarkers, i.e., gifs, but it’s still pretty good.

Finally, I was moving some boxes around and came across some old photos. Thursday is the traditional day for this, but seeing as how this was taken in Charlotte’s neighborhood, I thought I’d jump the gun by a few days. This was our 1988 vacation, which was spent half at Yellowstone National Park and half at a dude ranch down the Boulder River valley. The photo was taken on one of our most memorable rides, when we climbed an ordinary-looking hill and came out on some sort of bench — I think that’s the word — that went on forever. Rainless clouds covered the sky and the look, and the light, was remarkable. I offer this because I look a) young; b) happy; and c) even a little girlish, an adjective that stopped working for me well before my girlhood ran out. And because you can see why Charlotte prefers Montana to suburban Chicago.

Curly perm, double denim and that hat. It was a great day.

Have a good one yourself, all. See you back here tomorrow. I hope.

In addition to all the tsuris of the last week, I’m starting to have the sort of computer problems that are nothing but dire portents — sudden freezing, crashes, you know the drill. If I were a conscientious person, I’d have spent a chunk of Sunday at the Apple store. But you know what I did instead?

I went to the pool. First I did yoga, then rode my bike to the pool. I swam no laps, but practiced my back float and lazy sidestroke. I was haphazard with my sunblock, so I have some rosy spots here and there. Then I came home and Alan fixed me a Moscow mule. It was delicious and precisely what I needed. The last 10 days have been all work. I needed a little play, and I got some.

And now I have a new car, the Grosse Pointe mommiest car possible — a 2006 Volvo XC70 wagon. Five cylinders, meh gas mileage, but safe and all-wheel-drive, which after last winter feels like pulling into a safe harbor. It’ll hold all the DVAS plus most of their gear. It’ll hold a bike or two. It’ll hold a lot of stuff. That’s sort of what Volvo wagons are known for — their holding capabilities. That, and their safety features. This thing has everything but an iPod jack, but I’m going to call around on that today and see what the damage is to have one installed after-market. I’m sure, in 2006, the Swedes thought this iPod thing was just a fad and there was no need to alter their world-famous design to accommodate such a silly gewgaw.

And on top of everything else, we had comp’ny Friday night, although it was J.C. and Sammy, who are always welcome. We took them out to meet some of our Detroit friends, and a good time was had by all. At least I think so. How bad can an evening be when everyone unites in shared hatred of the waitress? She treated us like we had ebola. Of course I tipped her 20 percent.

Fortunately, I have some great bloggage.

If you asked me if I would like to read a mid-length essay about a man’s love for his cat, I’d have said, “Why, no, but thanks for asking.” Which is why I’m glad I overcame my snap judgment to read “A Man and His Cat” on the cover of the NYT Sunday op-ed section. It’s a stitch:

I’ve speculated that people have a certain reservoir of affection that they need to express, and in the absence of any more appropriate object — a child or a lover, a parent or a friend — they will lavish that same devotion on a pug or a Manx or a cockatiel, even on something neurologically incapable of reciprocating that emotion, like a monitor lizard or a day trader or an aloe plant. Konrad Lorenz confirms this suspicion in his book “On Aggression,” in which he describes how, in the absence of the appropriate triggering stimulus for an instinct, the threshold of stimulus for that instinct is gradually lowered; for instance, a male dove deprived of female doves will attempt to initiate mating with a stuffed pigeon, a rolled-up cloth or any vaguely bird-shaped object, and, eventually, with an empty corner of its cage.

Although I can clearly see this syndrome as pathological in others, I was its medical textbook illustration, the Elephant Man of the condition. I did not post photographs of my cat online or talk about her to people who couldn’t be expected to care, but at home, alone with the cat, I behaved like some sort of deranged arch-fop. I made up dozens of nonsensical names for the cat over the years — The Quetzal, Quetzal Marie, Mrs. Quetzal Marie the Cat, The Inquetzulous Q’ang Marie. There was a litany I recited aloud to her every morning, a sort of daily exhortation that began, “Who knows, Miss Cat, what fantastical adventures the two of us will have today?” I had a song I sang to her when I was about to vacuum, a brassy Vegas showstopper called “That Thing You Hate (Is Happening Again).” We collaborated on my foot-pedal pump organ to produce The Hideous Cat Music, in which she walked back and forth at her discretion on the keyboard while I worked the pedals. The Hideous Cat Music resembled the work of the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, with aleatory passages and unnervingly sustained tone clusters.

I’ve never had a cat, but all of my dogs have had approximately 7,000 diminutives. You all know Wendy, aka Wendall, Wemberley, etc. Enjoy.

Coozledad sent this thing, a sketch of life aboard the custom jet used by Led Zeppelin, Elton John, the Rolling Stones and others during their ’70s super tours. Take a look at that fake-fur spread on the queen-size waterbed and imagine what it would have looked like under a UV light. Ew.

Finally, another NYT link, for which I apologize, but it was a good Sunday paper for August: Missouri is considering adding right-to-farm to its state constitution. What a…terrible idea. Those of you who don’t live in an agricultural state cannot know how wealthy and powerful these farm-advocacy groups can be, all the while poor-mouthing about the Plight of the Farmer. And why is this happening?

…(A) coalition of state farming groups and major agriculture corporations have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to take aim at the Humane Society, which led a successful fight in 2010 to regulate inhumane dog-breeding practices in Missouri.

Backers of the amendment are wary of laws that have passed in other states, like California, where voters in 2008 approved roomier living conditions for hens, and Oregon, where a rural county’s ban on genetically modified crops was overwhelmingly passed in May.

…Opponents have protested that the amendment would be a boon for large industrial farms that would like to avoid potential laws controlling their treatment of animals or the environment, allowing them to pollute the land, extend the use of genetically modified crops and freely experiment with the use of antibiotics in livestock, a trend that has concerned scientists.

As someone who lives in an urban area a lot of people are hot to farm (and are farming), I can tell you these laws are all written to favor rural landowners and their interests. If I lived in my native state (St. Louis born!), I’d be voting no.

Seriously. You know why half a million people in Toledo are without water today, why it can’t even be boiled to safety? Algae blooms caused by agricultural runoff. Imagine these folks with a constitution backing them up.

But I vote yes on this upcoming week, and hope yours is wonderful. I sure hope mine is.

I really do apologize for being such a craptastic blogger of late. It’s not going to get better for a while, but it will get better. This has truly been the week from purgatory, and simply unrelenting. Lots of tasks, normally something I like, but it was a big pile and I didn’t get the most important ones done, which means – well, you know what it means. More work.

But it’s purgatory, not hell. Like wearing an itchy sweater. Although it didn’t help that I got rained on during my afternoon dog-walk. The sun stayed out the whole time, but it rained pretty hard. Hollywood rain, but no rainbow.

So, then:

Here’s Charlotte’s neighbor, the famous poet. Boy, does he look every day of his 75 years or so. I’ve grown exasperated with Jim Harrison in recent years, but there are some good lines in a breezy read. Worth a click.

We have a proposal on the August ballot, what should be a simple approval of an allegedly revenue-neutral change in the tax laws. There’s no opposition, both D’s and R’s agree, and? It’s not doing so well. I liked this comment from a local expert:

The fact that almost all the politicians in the state are supporting the proposal might have been valuable 40 years ago, when many people genuinely trusted state government. But today, it’s more like hearing that all the mafia families have gotten together and are hatching big plans.

And that’s about all I have. Let’s get through the weekend and see what happens.

Where is July these days? It barely scraped 70 degrees today, and then only when the sun was out, and it wasn’t out much. I was in the office in no sleeves, and practically froze to death.

It’s shaping up to be an insane week — deadlines, deadlines and…houseguests! Plus we have a failing car; the Passat now requires a repair that will cost more than its value, and it’s just sitting in its parking spot, being disappointing. I really hoped it would go well past 165K, but it doesn’t look to be in the cards. So we spent the weekend trying to find a used wagon (has to hold an acoustic bass, or bass/amp/drum set, the standard rhythm-section quandary). We think we found one in an eight-year-old Volvo wagon, but it won’t be paid for for a few days, which means…complications.

So, some links:

These anti-vax people. I have no words.

Those of you who remember the towering documentary “Streetwise” from 1993 might be interested in how it turned out for the filmmakers, and Tiny, the central character of the film about Seattle street kids. A nice column.

A fascinating explanation of how the FDA approves, or fails to approve, sunscreen. Yes, sunscreen.

Happy Monday, all.

I said expect some photo posts this summer, so here you go.

I found this video on my phone, having utterly forgotten it from a couple of weeks ago. It’s from Port Huron, at the start of the Mackinac race. When the boats start to make their way out of the river to the starting line, the Port Huron Yacht Club hosts a troupe of pipers to send them off. Sort of cool. Click here if you want to watch it.

The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad had a big weekend — five gigs in four days, one of them on the University of Michigan student radio station. It was to promote some local-music festival. They made the Metro Times listings:

Look at Justin Timberlake, checkin’ out my girls. Step off, pop star. You can’t handle the DVAS.

The best gig of the weekend was Thursday’s, at the Magic Stick. The theme was Space Jam, so decorations were in order:

They were very energetic. I will say, that after years of dragging Kate around to jazz gigs and other music lessons, six months with this band has done far more for her confidence than all that sophisticated repertoire she played with various ensembles. She’s having a ball, and so a ball she will continue to have.

How was y’all’s weekend? I spent it working on the book, and was rewarded with a strongly ass-smelling Mitch Albom column. The past week included Detroit’s 313th birthday, and if you’ve ever called someone here, you know that’s the city’s area code. So there were a number of parties, festivals, throwdowns and the like going on all week. These included: A “body-positive,” i.e. semi-nude bike ride, a street-band festival, about a million other things. A guy I know who’s involved with the people who own and operate Gon KiRin, aka the dragon art car that shoots actual fire out of her nostrils, got her out and about. They got pulled over by the cops. Let me just set up the punchline by sketching out what this thing offers:

The beast is 22-1/2 feet tall and about 80 feet long, weighing in at 8 tons. It’s an “art car,” built onto the frame of an old Dodge W-300 Power Wagon with a 318 engine. There’s a 1,500-pound second-story DJ booth encased in steel wicker, mounted on a Marine Zodiac attack boat under the monster’s spine. The whole contraption can carry more than a dozen riders, with seats in the mouth and in a party couch on the back, where riders can make the tail sway back and forth.

So guess what the offense was? One of the artists had his 2-year-old son with him, and he wasn’t in a child safety seat. On a dragon.

With all this going on, with this vast buffet of snacks and bonbons to choose from, here’s part of Mitch’s offering on the 313 celebration:

What we are — what we remain — is a place that celebrates things like its 313th birthday. A place that immortalizes an annual car cruise down Woodward Avenue. That treats Opening Day of the baseball season as a religious experience. That considers walking around new cars in tuxedos and black dresses the biggest party of the year.

We are resilient in our traditions. Fiercely proud of own. We act as if Tim Allen still walks down our streets and Bob Seger is releasing a top 10 song this week, as if Motown is a thriving business, not a museum, and Gordie Howe could lace them up and play a few shifts if he wanted to.

Tim Allen. Bob Seger. Motown. The Dream Cruise (which doesn’t come near Detroit). If this guy were any more out of touch, he’d be living in California. All of the above details about the goings-on could have been gleaned from a cursory run through the free weekly’s listings. I can’t stand it.

OK, then. I just sent this David Carr column to my colleagues. It’s about the use of immediate social-media technology to report on breaking news, and the complications and rule-bending it brings with it:

Tyler Hicks, a longtime photographer for The Times, was at a hotel in Gaza City across from the beach where the four Palestinian boys died. He tweeted the news immediately, took a photo that was hard to glance at and then wrote about what it was like to be standing there.

He said that he felt horrified, but that in a clinical sense, he also felt exposed. “If children are being killed, what is there to protect me, or anyone else?”

The act of witness, a foundation of war reporting, has been democratized and disseminated in new ways. The same device that carries photos of your mother’s new puppy or hosts aimless video games also serves up news from the front.

Are you middle-class? Feeling poorer today? There’s a reason.

OK, I’m outta here. Have a great week, everyone. Expect more spotty service.

When we travel, we make plans to see national landmarks, great museums, the crown jewels. And then we get there, and we remember things like one of our German guests last week, who, when asked about her impressions of America so far, mentioned the toilets.

Apparently they have a button system in Germany – one button for liquids, another for solids. Kate immediately chimed in, having traveled there last summer: “Yes! The buttons!”

So I guess that’s how memories are made: In the room you visit multiple times a day.

Later in the week, Johanna showed us an aerial photo of her house, and I asked what the crops were in the surrounding fields. “I don’t know the word,” she said. “It is a seed for making oil.”

Soy? No. Canola? No. She reached for her translator, pecked out the word and blanched.

“Oh, rapeseed,” I said. You can imagine how awkward.

Speaking of Germans, here are ours:

Johanna and Henrike are the ones on the outside – ours. The inner pair stayed with a friend, and this was the day we took them to Comerica Park, duh, where they capered under the big Tiger and took many pictures. We didn’t take them to the game, because they would have been bored, so we took them to the mall, where everything is so cheap! Their suitcases were already hernia bait when they arrived, and that was before two shopping trips, with Windsor and Boston still on the itinerary.

So it was a fun trip for them, I hope. The first night we went to a bar in Hamtramck where Kate’s band was playing, but the music was delayed and the bar is one that doesn’t enforce the smoking law, so they mostly stared at their phones.

“I dunno, I thought a couple of German kids might want to see an authentic Detroit rock club,” I told a friend afterward.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “You know there are pictures of that place all over German Twitter hashtagged #fuckyeahdetroit.”

If only. They mostly seemed to enjoy the shopping, and watching “Mean Girls” on Netflix. (German-dubbed name: “Girls Club.”)

And that was just one part of the last action-packed week. There were also trips to and from Port Huron and Mackinac for the race. Kate took off for the weekend, so there was an airport stop-off. Essentially, this weekend was the first down time I’ve had. Did some yoga — man, did that feel good after a few hundred miles of driving — and took a long bike ride. We ended up at the Eastern Market’s new Sunday market, where the vegetable stalls are replaced by crafts and other summer-festival sorts of stuff. I had a booze-infused popsicle and headed for home.

This week, and the next few, threaten to be just as crazed, but I will strive to keep up here. Thanks for being such great commenters in my absence. You all are the best.

In the meantime…

Pro-Russian separatists are said to be collecting the bodies of the dead plane-crash victims and? Holding them. Who ARE these people?

I can’t stop watching this Elaine Stritch performance of “The Ladies Who Lunch,” and I thank Roy for finding it:

And another crazy week begins. In English.

A distant neighbor owns a hound of some sort. He’s baying now. Hounds bay because you’d never call the sound they make barking. I always kind of wanted a hound dog, maybe a bloodhound, but hound people are always waving me off. “They have that hound smell,” they say, without actually elaborating on it. Oh, the hound smell. OK.

Foxhunters call it “the music,” the sound of the pack baying as one. I don’t think they mind the smell, but a pack of working foxhounds generally lives in a kennel and not in a home, so there.

I just like the way making noise seems to take some effort, and the bigger the dog, the more effort is required. A bloodhound starts with some awrs, and then some awr-roo, and only after priming the pump can he do a full-throated awr-roo-roo-roo. It sounds wonderful. Surely the hound smell can’t be that bad.

Just checked the internet. I guess it is. Particularly with bassets. Noted.

As you can surely tell, I’d really rather watch “Orange is the New Black” or something similar on the telly right now. I think I’ll do that. The week is winding down, and my mind is seeking another gear. So a little bloggage:

This story is pitched as a medical miracle, but honestly, it’s a story about child abuse. An infant mauled in her crib by a “pet” raccoon? Because she had a propped bottle in there with her? It’s sick-making. (Note: The current parents are not the ones who let this happen.)

Before “Seinfeld” is eclipsed by the brilliant Twitter of @SeinfeldToday (“Jerry gets paranoid about his girlfriend’s past when her iPhone automatically connects to the wi-fi at Newman’s apartment.”), let’s remember when it was new. Really new.

I do yoga, so does Lady Gaga. Only she dresses a little differently.

That’s all, folks.