I go through that entire brutal winter without so much as a sniffle and then, just as the sweet, sweet summer is dawning, I get a cold — sore throat, the whole nine. Yesterday I came home from work, crawled into bed, and didn’t get out until Alan brought me Thai takeout.

And today I am absolutely slammed.

So open thread for today and maybe tomorrow.

I’ve lost a bit of weight. Not much — I still have 12 pounds to go before the CDC no longer considers me overweight — but enough that my clothes don’t fit right anymore. As much fun as it is to be able to insert your fist between your stomach and waistband, it’s equally a pain to have to keep hitching your pants up. So I’ve been rewarding myself with a little shopping. The closeout place I like for cheap workout gear and this ‘n’ that has been throwing one of these into their delivery boxes:

Speaking of losing weight. Let’s see if we can count all the silliness just on the front of the label. These are “dark chocolate covered real fruit juice pieces.” Please explain how juice, a liquid, can come in a “piece.” Then there’s the mysterious açai berry, which I’ve been seeing in my junk mail for a couple years now — apparently it’s a superfood, or a weight-loss aid, or something. But there’s blueberry in there, too; I have to assume it’s juice, so… this is a mixture of acai and blueberry juice, somehow pieced out and covered with dark chocolate. It’s a “natural source of flavanol antioxidants.” What is this stuff, anyway? It’s health-food candy. It’s not a Snickers bar, it has antioxidants! Antioxidants go in pursuit of free radicals in your body, which everybody knows are rilly, rilly bad. So eat the candy. Guilt-free.

It was tasty, I’ll give it that. Sixty-five calories.

Getting back to the CDC and its body-mass index, which has been criticized for being stupid and inaccurate: I’m going to keep trying to lose, but entirely without any pressure or expectation; the BMI is just a guideline. After years of being nauseated by my thighs (but not enough to lose my appetite), I’ve decided to accept them. I’ve said before that the truth of being female in this culture is, the body you hate today will be the one you wish you still had tomorrow, and I’m going to appreciate mine while it still works and is still relatively pain-free. Strength, flexibility, balance, fun — if it hits on at least three of those cylinders most of the time, I’m going to call it a good day.

Yoga helps with all of this, which may explain its popularity. But for someone like me and, maybe, you — those of us whose heads tend to go buzz buzz buzz all the livelong day — it provides a solid hour in which the sole command is: Pay attention. I have a couple of good teachers at the moment, who are gentle and kind and walk that careful yoga line between too little and too much woo-woo. The other day I was sitting in the deepest twist I could muster, concentrating on breathing and back muscles, and reflected that most of us pay attention to our stomachs and genitals and not much else. I’m willing to believe that breathing deeply in this twist somehow makes my internal organs happy. How can thousands of years of flexible little Indian dudes be entirely wrong?

I can’t get on the antioxidants bandwagon, but I will eat their candy when it comes along.

Sorry to be boring.

A little bloggage:

We’ve discussed the wedding-industrial complex here many times, but I thought this blog post from Esquire.com made an important point: As a proportion of wealth, the typical American wedding is far more expensive than the Kanye/Kardashian affair in Florence over the weekend. And then there’s this part:

The culture that demands a big wedding hurts the poor worst of all. In 2005’s “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage,” Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas explained why even women who didn’t have much money wanted a lavish wedding. “Having the wherewithal to throw a ‘big’ wedding is a vivid display that the couple has achieved enough financial security to do more than live from paycheck to paycheck, a stressful situation that most believe leads almost inevitably to divorce. Hosting a “proper” wedding is a sign that the couple only plans to do it once, “given the obvious financial sacrifice.” This is the equivalent, financially, of cutting of your arm to demonstrate how strong you are. The needs of a big wedding also leads to poor people marrying later and less often than rich people, which brings with it a host of negative socioeconomic consequences.

Yup.

This man is a hero:

The father of a young man gunned down Friday during the rampage in Santa Barbara said he is asking members of Congress to stop calling him to offer condolences but nothing more for the death of his only child, Christopher Michaels-Martinez.

“I don’t care about your sympathy. I don’t give a s— that you feel sorry for me,” Richard Martinez said during an extensive interview, his face flushed as tears rolled down his face. “Get to work and do something. I’ll tell the president the same thing if he calls me. Getting a call from a politician doesn’t impress me.”

If a few more people said that to a few more members of Congress, daily, things might change in Washington. Maybe.

Let’s go out on a bitter laugh; the Onion nails it with just the headline: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

Last year the Grosse Pointe schools got a lot of bad local publicity, and a little bad national publicity, over the spectacular mishandling of a speech by Rick Santorum at one of the local high schools.

Long story short, the superintendent got played by the teenage Young Americans for Freedom chapter. They allegedly raised the money to pay Santorum’s $18,000 speaking fee — something I don’t believe for a minute — and came to the principal with the request he speak during school hours. Even though there was a perfectly fine policy right there in the rule book saying clubs have to hold these sorts of functions after hours, the principal said yes, then no. The YAF recognized the giant blinking neon sign over that one, and exploited it. There were a few days of yadda-yadda, much of it truly embarrassing, and finally, the sage of Pennsylvania was permitted to speak.

No one remembers what he said, although I’m sure it’s Googleable. Oh, here it is: He challenged them to lead.

Even the YAF must have figured it wouldn’t be able to fool the administration two years in a row, and this year’s speaker was a great deal less sexy: Steve Forbes. Yep, that guy. Parents were presented with an opt-out option, but the hell with that, I figured, let the young people behold this sage of the late-20th-century GOP and hear his lessons.

The Freep said he gave the young people “an economics lesson.” It was not “be born rich, fail to save the family business from the rocky shoal of the internet, then fall back on a still-considerable personal fortune,” but rather, the virtues of a flat tax. What a letdown, although I’m sure Forbes himself was absolutely thrilled that someone wanted to pay for this message, one he’s been delivering since much of his audience was in utero. Loved this detail from the story:

Asia Simmons, 15, of Harper Woods and Chloe Ribco, 14, of Grosse Pointe Woods described the talk as cool and interesting.

(Kate Derringer, 17, disagreed, calling Forbes’ address “really boring.”)

Reporters got a little more out of him, asking about the Detroit bankruptcy. Guess what he said?

Forbes predicted that Detroit could recover quickly after bankruptcy with the right approach, namely a lower tax burden.

Do these guys ever get tired of beating this drum? I guess not, when a trip to Michigan on a lovely spring day is dangled in front of them.

Kate said he also praised corporations for the good work they do. Funny. Kate’s been working almost a year for a corporate-owned ice-cream restaurant that shall remain nameless, and we’ve used it several times to illustrate the need for unions in this country. Once ice cream season slows down in the fall, hours get cut way back — totally understandable. But along with the cold weather came a new wrinkle: On-call hours. Workers are expected to make no other plans for their on-call shifts and stand ready to come in if summoned, but if not summoned? No pay.

“Now you know why labor needs a voice,” I told her many times last winter, sometimes humming “Solidarity Forever.” I’ve also counseled her to quit and find something better, but it appears, like her mother, Kate never found a rut she couldn’t love. (I think that line originates with Laura Lippman.)

So, then, as the opening weekend of summer yawns before us, some bloggage:

I recall when this art theft happened. My friend Adrianne said she’d written a paper on “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee” and had spent a lot of time in front of the canvas, absorbing its composition. She felt a real wound when it and 12 other works were plucked from the Gardner Museum walls and taken who-knows-where; it was an early lesson in the power of public art, one I’ve thought of many times as Detroit’s own art collection has been threatened.

Now it turns out they think they found at least some of the pieces — in the hands of organized-crime figures with Italian names. And here I thought those folks were all about Lladro.

Have a great holiday weekend, everyone. Let’s enjoy every last burger.

I keep meaning to tuck my Russian grammar book into my bag on mornings when I take the bus, and forgetting. After the phone gets boring, I end up looking out the window, and today I decided I’d been too hard on “Twelve Years a Slave.” I found myself thinking about Michael Fassbender, who plays an exceptionally cruel slave master.

His performance captures not only the cruelty (the easy part), but the way slavery corrupted everyone it touched. It’s kind of a brilliant performance, in fact, as his character, Epps, has to beat, rape, humiliate and otherwise be almost one-dimensional in his insane evil. And yet, there’s something behind his eyes that says, this isn’t easy for me, either. How the hell did he do that? I guess that’s what great acting is.

And with that, I feel like I’ve said what there is to say today. It was an enervating day, but it ended with grilled chicken and a black-bean salad thing I sort of made up on the spot, and it was great. Could be a lot worse.

So let’s get to the bloggage:

You Lynda Barry fans take note: She’s alive and well and teaching at the University of Wisconsin. Alan and I saw one of her plays in Chicago early in our courtship; it remains a wonderful memory.

Gordon Willis, an artist with sepia, is dead.

I was struck by the photo accompanying this story about Flint’s fiscal problems. I recall being there a few years ago on assignment, taking a turn off a main drag into a neighborhood and being shocked — it looked like rural Mississippi, or something close. The picture captures it well.

I need to sleep. See you in the morning, all.

I just deleted a spam comment from a user called EXTREME BIGGER PENIS. Does that work? Has it ever worked? Is there an individual in the history of the internet who said, “Yeah, that’s just what I’m in the market for,” and clicked? Obviously someone must have, or they wouldn’t keep trying.

Maybe EXTREME BIGGER PENIS is like $170 French bra — just one of those things you dream about, but never really expect to have.

Hope everyone’s weekend was great. Mine was pretty good, although I didn’t go to the market. Sunday was Flower Day, which really means Flower Weekend, which means I’d turn back if I were you. Seemingly every suburban family in metro Detroit descends on the market, each dragging a wagon behind, intent on buying a yard’s worth of bedding plants at discount prices, while also stopping for lunch and absorbing the Authentic Urban Atmosphere ™ in the bargain.

A friend of mine was up bright and early and thought he could get in and out at 7 a.m. Sunday. No dice.

Ah, well. What I did instead was grill a little and drink some wine. Watched two movies — “Let the Fire Burn” and “Twelve Years of Slave,” which was sort of an all-bummer double feature. I liked the both, but “Let the Fire Burn” will stay with me longer. It’s a remarkable piece of work, about the MOVE disaster in Philadelphia in 1985. I recall paying a lot of attention to it when it happened, because the two Philly papers were part of Knight-Ridder, my own paper’s parent company, and lots of people in Fort Wayne had some sort of connection to the place.

But I was too young and ignorant to truly grasp the horror of what happened, too quick to accept the journo-description of MOVE as “an activist group,” which is not what they were. They were, “Let the Fire Burn” makes clear, a like-minded group of crazy people who were dedicated to, and desirous of, a lethal confrontation with police, who screwed up their end of things in every way possible.

If you lived through it, you know what happened: Something like 30 square blocks of working-class Philadelphia burned, because MOVE was dug in to the last man (last child, really), and the cops wanted no survivors. It’s a horrible, tragic story, told entirely — and this is why I think it will stay with me — through contemporaneous video. There are no talking heads, no looks back through the lens of time, but rather, archival news footage and public-TV video of a post-disaster inquest, the sort of thing no one pays attention to outside of the immediate circle of those affected. It gives it a you-were-there immediacy, and if you’re paying attention, you are simply astounded.

“Twelve Years a Slave,” on the other hand, was simply a well-made, well-acted and well-written bummer from the first frame to the last. I feel about the same way that I did after watching “United 93” — glad I saw it, even gladder that I never have to see it again.

Ever.

Other than that, it was the usual weekend: Cooking, exercise, shopping, errands. And so we notch another week off the indefinite number we are allotted. I wish I had more money to travel; it would be nice to notch out a few in some place like Istanbul or Beijing.

Bloggage? Sure:

Chihuahuas! On the loose, gettin’ in trouble! In Arizona!

This NYT piece on “trigger warnings” is getting beaten up all over the internets. I don’t want to pile on, but I’d be interested in hearing alternate views.

And so we launch ourselves into another Monday. Here we go.

I’ve been reading the Jill Abramson story. That’s the New York Times editor who was abruptly cashiered today, or so the story is shaping up. I read the first news-alert piece today from the NYT, which called the transition “unexpected.” My first thought was, someone has cancer. But now it appears, via Ken Auletta at the link above, that it was a more prosaic reason:

As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson had also been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, having spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, accounting for some of the pension disparity. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said that Jill Abramson’s total compensation as executive editor “was directly comparable to Bill Keller’s”—though it was not actually the same. I was also told by another friend of Abramson’s that the pay gap with Keller was only closed after she complained. But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories.

Pushy. Well, that’s what leaning in will get you.

Abramson is a big supporter of the Knight-Wallace Fellows, and visited Ann Arbor when I was there. She’s smart and personable and has a truly distinctive voice, this sort of nasal New York drawl, if that makes sense. (You’ve heard of people who have “a face for radio?” Well, she has a voice for print, but she made a joke about it, so she gets points.) She answered every question directly and seemed truly comfortable in her skin. The Times had recently taken some flack about publishing photos from the horrible ambush of American contractors in Iraq in 2004, where the bodies were dragged and burned and hoisted up for public view like charred barbecue. She explained why they made the call they did. Beyond that, I don’t what to say other than she was right to point out the pay discrepancy.

You could make the argument that the NYT had been overpaying for a while, and it was just bad timing that Abramson took the editor’s job when the publisher decided the salary had to return to earth. But she was also underpaid when she was managing editor, and apparently there’s a deputy m.e. who earned more than she did. I have a feeling this is a more-will-be-revealed thing.

So. Many years ago, I made a dismissive remark about cats in a column. I’m not a cat hater, but I’ve never had one of my own, and I guess I fell for the cruel cat stereotype that they’re aloof and would happily watch their masters writhe on the ground in pain, asking only that the hoomin please leave some food out before heading to the hospital. I got a note for a woman who claimed her cat had awakened her — by jumping on her chest and meowing loudly — during a break-in at her house. I forget the cat’s name, but I did a hooray-for-Mr.-Jinxy column and that was that.

Evidently heroism runs in the gene pool. I had no idea.

Not much more to add today, but there’s this: The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad has three songs on Bandcamp, which you may listen to and download, if you’re so inclined. They were produced by my friend Jim Diamond, who did them gratis because he’s a mensch. He said they added some percussion in post, and Kate played the cowbell. “Move closer to the mic, Kate, I need more cowbell,” he said, noting that’s the first time he’s ever spoken those words in his career. It got a big laugh. I expect the DVAS won’t be to everybody’s liking, but I hope Borden digs ’em, because he knows his girl groups.

As for the lyrics, I have only this to say: Johnny Cash didn’t really shoot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

Happy Thursday, all.

No breakfast in bed for me yesterday; I get up earlier than everyone else in the house every day of the week, and Sunday is the one day of the week I can linger in the gym. Isn’t Mothers Day supposed to be about what mothers want?

So I got up, walked the dog, made pancakes-bacon-coffee for the house and was en route to hitting the weight rack and Pilates before anyone else was even moving. Now it’s late afternoon, and I’m barbecuing ribs. Also: Mac and cheese and collard greens. If that sounds more like a Fathers Day menu, you’re not alone, but it’s a lovely day and it just seemed to require ribs.

But the big project today is the back yard, which is finally starting to shape up. The decision last fall to cover the bare ground with leaf mulch paid off; with that and the steady snow cover, we didn’t have nearly the mud problem I anticipated. And now the plants are going in. Wendy has grass to pee and poop in — sod, but it really made more sense than waiting on seed to sprout. We loaded up on bedding plants at the Eastern Market, and with any luck, we’ll have a pretty nice place to hang after a couple of weeks. We have furniture and a fire bowl and, depending on the landscape architect’s inspiration (that would be Alan) a nice varied landscape of this and that.

Somewhere in there was a nice Delmonico steak and some sautéed morels. That’s Livin’.(tm)

I spent some time paging through social media today, where many people were posting photos of their mothers — the still-young ones, the old and stooped ones and the faded black-and-whites of mothers already gone. It reminded me that time is fleeting, and so are morels. Sauté them in butter, then.

What went on in your world?

A bit of bloggage before the week begins:

Alaska isn’t really the Alaska you see on reality television.

Michael Sam’s boyfriend. Whoa — nice abs.

Monday awaits. Attack it.

I’m writing a story tonight, not my favorite kind (the ones with funny, quotable, interesting people) but something closer to its opposite (the ones with spreadsheets and ten million cross tabs), which means I am scowling, squinting, cursing and wishing for a monitor as big as the Ritz. Or at least as big as Al Gore’s. All of them.

So let’s go to some lively bloggage, and welcome the weekend.

One of those New Yorker casuals, “Missed Connections for A-holes.” Yep:

We made small talk in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s. You said that you literally could not live without the salsa you were buying. I wish we could talk again. You used “literally” incorrectly. It really pissed me off. I wish you could literally not live without that salsa, because then I’d take it from you.

Love the Oatmeal. The story of a very bad parrot.

I’m enjoying last week’s “This American Life.” Subject: Getting high. I’m sure a few of you folks might like it. Back to this spreadsheet, and have a great day, everyone.

At the moment, my alleged Jack Russell Terrier is snoozing on Alan’s lap. Alan is also snoozing. And I’m reading a story paddy’o sent over today, thinking about animals and how they do what they do. The story is about a Jack Russell named Chuck. From Slate:

Then came a late winter day in February. I was restacking a heap of awkwardly cut logs that had been sitting behind the barn for a season or two, and Chuck sat to watch. I flinched when a rat suddenly leapt out, but Chuck moved decisively; applying her small teeth to the nape of its neck, severing its spinal cord with surgical precision. She sat over the dead rat and looked me in the eye, perfectly still except for the wagging stub of her tail.

I kept working and the rats streamed out, Chuck killing them one by one, all her muscles tensed with the passion that had been bred into her by a slightly mad clergyman—a man named John Russell—over a century ago. When three slipped out at once, Chuck anticipated their hopeless angles of escape, killing the third just as it made it to the high grass, its two companions still twitching with their broken necks, their tiny mouths open in shock.

By the time I pried the last log from the frozen dirt, she had killed 14 rats, and the corpses littered the field. She turned her back and went to find my mother.

Wendy is getting better at stalking squirrels. The other day she tumbled with one in the back yard, but isn’t as efficient at killing them as Chuck. Maybe that’s because she’s showing a very non-terrier behavior — pointing. She lowers her head, raises her tail and will. Not. Be. Moved. For long moments on end, she will stand, frozen, waiting for one of her quarry to make a wrong move.

One of these days she’ll get one. Just not yet.

I wonder what sort of mix is in Wendy’s blood. She looks like a JRT, but she doesn’t really act like one — she’s not as aloof as a good terrier generally is, and Spriggy certainly never pointed anything other than his nose into one of Kate’s friend’s North Face jacket. (And not into the pocket, either. He ate his way through the fleece in pursuit of a Reese’s Cup she had zipped in there.)

You all know how much I love watching specially bred animals doing the things they were specially bred for. It’s just one of those things.

And now I have the depleted-Monday catching-up-on-Sunday’s-teevee blues. One more piece of bloggage and I’m off to the rack, but it’s a good one: Libertarians have taken over Keene, N.H., being jerks with extreme prejudice:

The activists selected this New England-cute city of 24,000 for liberation mostly because it lies within that flinty bastion of Yankee individualism known as New Hampshire, where “Live Free or Die” is carved into the collective granite.

Back in 2003, a libertarian-leaning group called the Free State Project decided that this small state could be a liberty lover’s paradise if enough like-minded people settled here. (The movement, by the way, tends to attract white males, according to Carla Gericke, the group’s president, a white South African who has lived for many years in this country. “I’m the token African-American,” she joked.)

A dozen years in, the Free State Project is about three-quarters of the way toward achieving its goal of having 20,000 people commit to relocating to the state, after which it will “trigger the move.” The project has already influenced the statewide conversation at times — partly because of “early movers” like Ian Freeman, a Floridian who bought an old white duplex on Leverett Street several years ago and quickly set out to push local buttons.

Y’all chew on that while I slink off to slumber. See you in the ayem.

The weekend is over and not a lot of fun was had — work and errands and the usual seemed to pile up a bit higher this week. But I did some reading and walked the dog and got some exercise. The Metro Times Blowout was this weekend — it’s a local-music festival, the loud kind — and I got to one show Friday but happily turned my wristband over to Kate the next night. Saw some friends, drank a couple of beers and finished off with the final concert of Kate’s jazz season. One of the mothers called for a group picture but couldn’t get her camera to work, so I did her a solid and emailed her mine:

As stated before in this space, they really put the “creative” in Creative Jazz Ensemble, what with having three violins and all. They also have three guitarists, but two were no-shows for this show. Good thing my little girl was there to be the bottom, as one of the numbers was “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” and you really can’t do that without a bass.

One other thing from Saturday: Watched “Her,” which immediately became my favorite movie of 2013. It won best original screenplay at the Oscars, and no other nominated film of the last year came close to it. It’s about a lonely writer, Theodore, in some vague future version of Los Angeles who falls in love with the disembodied voice of his computer operating system; think Siri after about 20 more generations of improvement. The story is great enough, but what I really fell in love with was the setting of a smoggy Los Angeles where everyone walks around talking, but not to the people around them. Computers have pretty much replaced human contact — the scenes of Theodore’s interaction with his flesh-and-blood friends don’t look like nearly as much fun as his playful chats with Samantha, his OS. Even lonely bedtime masturbation can be done online with a partner with just a few voice commands. His job is writing customized letters for others, to others. The world is entirely a service economy, and this is what we’re selling — canned emotions and disembodied love.

Seriously, I recommend it to anyone who considers these things, and given that we’re a disembodied community here, most of whom don’t even know what other members look like, it almost suggests a virtual movie club.

So, I’m going down to make a simple dinner and see what Sunday-night TV has in store. A little bloggage today:

Jazz hands! A Minneapolis Star-Tribune reporter embeds at a high-school musical and files a report.

God, I hate circuses.

Meanwhile, back in Detroit, the Cinco de Mayo parade is cancelled after someone is shot to death pretty much smack in the middle of it.

Happy Monday, all.