The New York Times specializes in a type of affect-less reporting on the problems of rich people. I recall a piece from around Thanksgiving a few years back, which detailed the difficulty of getting high-end appliances repaired when you’ve installed them in your country house, which may be in some shithole Adirondacks village where they’ve never heard of a Sub-Zero refrigerator. Can you imagine?

Here’s another, about a “cabin” in the Hamptons which cost, all in, about $5 million. Sample quotes: “I have three pillars in my life: I work, I spend a lot of time with my family and I work out.” “With the harsh winter, we’ve already had our roof leak. It’s a constant work in progress to keep everything maintained.” The exterior cedar will have to be refinished every five years. I’m really, really rooting for this house to become the monster it already seems to be, and for it to consume its owners, Mr. and Mrs. Mattis.

Not that I wish to start the weekend on a sour note. Perhaps the Mattises are lovely people. But I doubt it.

Speaking of other people who may be lovely, but with whom I doubt I could stay in a room for even five minutes, ladies and gentlemen, Alice Waters:

When you’re in New York City, how do you decide on where to eat?

I’m always concerned first about the provenance of the food. I want to know where it comes from, so I go to the farmers market and see who buys there. I see what chefs are buying there, and I know by now, because I come to New York a lot. There’s a group who are very serious about everything that they serve, not just the salad. So I can count on the Union Square Greenmarket, but there are a lot of young chefs that I know personally or am connected with in some way, or with the restaurant or the extended family of the restaurant.

Because God forbid you should put one forkful into your mouth that you can’t recite the provenance of. Who was I reading a while back, some conservative who noted that in the ’50s, if you knew a typical housewife, she’d be very concerned with who you had sex with, but not at all with what you ate. The first was society’s business, the latter personal. Today it’s exactly the opposite.

Which brings me to one of my favorite new shows this…I guess we don’t really have “seasons” anymore, do we? That would be “Silicon Valley,” which is about guess-what. A trio of young app developers rent rooms in the house of an older man, Erlich, who struck a little oil with his own app and cashed out. He calls the house an “incubator,” and requires that any work developed there owes him a 10 percent equity share. Erlich fancies himself a mentor figure, but he’s only a few years older than the early-20s dweebs he rents to. One of his early laff lines: WHO ATE MY FUCKING QUINOA?! Which is especially funny when you see him eating (which he does a lot), because he’s always scarfing up ramen or some repulsive energy drink. The other day he walked into the frame eating a pink-frosted Pop-Tart. Hilarious.

No mention is made of the Pop-Tarts or energy drinks, because you don’t have to. Everyone walks around talking about “making the world a better place,” which mainly involves talking about it and yelling about quinoa. I’m sure they’re all very concerned about who produces their eggs, but buy an American car? Hell no.

Let’s skip to the bloggage before I find someone else to shower disdain upon.

Gerry Adams, yes that Gerry Adams, questioned in a murder case more than 40 years old. He’s now a member of the Irish parliament. Fascinating. (Speaking of “The Long Good Friday.”)

And I think this news has been reported before — that is, the discovery of a now-submerged former land bridge across Lake Huron — and now researchers have found structures built there, nearly 9,000 years old. Hunting blinds and rock formations built to drive caribou into ambushes.

I feel like I will be ambushed myself if I don’t get to the gym tonight. So that’s where I’m going. Have a great weekend, all.

Someone asked about the incident with the gin when I was 19. It’s not much of a story — just one of those afternoons where G&Ts were the perfect drink, until they weren’t. I recall the sun dazzling off the water. I felt like I believe the British must have felt in the last days of empire, and then there was that foghorn of nausea and oh, well.

I’ve mentioned this before about a million times, but Atul Gawande’s long New Yorker essay on nausea changed my whole way of thinking about it. He noted that a person who gets sick tonight on tequila or gin or whatever might never touch it again for the rest of his or her life. Yes and no, in my case. Yes to gin, but I’ve been beer-sick and wine-sick many times, and lived to drink both another day.

I drink less these days than I have in my entire adult life, but I enjoy it far more. Good wine is cheaper than ever, small-batch whiskey is the new vodka, craft beer has advanced past its silly phase — sorry, but I don’t think anyone appreciates raspberry flavors in a lager — and is now hitting its stride with good, deeply flavored brews of all sorts and for all seasons. It’s a good time to be a social drinker.

Oh, sorry: TRIGGER WARNING FOR ALCOHOLICS. Too late, I know.

I guess I’m the last person to have anything to say about the Sarah Palin speech in Indianapolis last weekend, but honestly, what is there to say? I actually found it embarrassing to watch, what little of it I could stand. She’s truly gone down the tunnel of narcissism into some strange reality on the other side. Her hair is messy, her face looks…like she’s been having some work done and her voice? Crazytown. Better to contemplate who I was embarrassed for. Palin? No, she’s incapable of it. The country? Sure, but too vague. And then I thought of people I’d known in 2008 who thought of her as the bee’s freakin’ knees. I don’t really know them well, but if I saw one today? I think I’d have to avert my eyes.

So, the world took Bob Hoskins away yesterday. Y’all know I’m a big “The Long Good Friday” fan, and I watched the last two minutes twice after I heard the news. I’ve seen it a dozen times at least, and it never loses its power. George Clooney did it in “Michael Clayton,” and I hope he had the good grace to admit it was an homage.

A nice quote here from the man, a few years back:

He learned about acting, he says, not from watching other actors but from studying women. ‘Men are completely emotionally dishonest, whereas women have an emotional honesty which is extraordinary. And drama is about private moments, it’s about the things you don’t see in the street, and men don’t show that. So I decided to watch women. I became a stalker, I suppose! It’s got nothing to do with femininity, it’s to do with emotional honesty. If you go home one night and there’s champagne on the table with your dinner and she’s done up but she’s pissed off, you know it. You know where you are with a woman. You don’t know with blokes. And that’s basically how I learned to act – just watching women.’

Oversimplified, but a sharp observation.

Finally, a nice essay by Mark Bittman on the power of comfort food. In his case, lox and bagels. Hello, Thursday, and we are over the hump.

Again, apologies for missing a day. Blah blah blah busy blah blah. Monday night, in search of sources for a story, I ended up at a neighborhood cooking night in Detroit, in which four couples get together and everybody makes a dish on the big Viking stove.

The house was a lovingly restored Tudor in an old Detroit neighborhood, and by lovingly I mean fabulously. One of the hosts showed me around the dining room, which had been gutted by fire in the ’70s. So they tore out the quick-fix drywall and had an artisan duplicate the oak paneling, which was stained dark. You could tell it was new because the pocket doors slid noiselessly and without friction. The fern on the dining room table was the pop of color in what could have been a gloomy interior, and of course the custom stained-glass windows helped. The living room was similarly beautiful, and full of fantastic midcentury furniture, which went perfectly with the Tudor architectural details, because good design of different eras can make beautiful music together, when the right eye does the combining.

I don’t need to tell you the gender mix of the couple, do I? My old boss Derek used to say that straight America wants to keep gay people down because we’re afraid they’re going to do everything better than we do. Has there ever been any doubt?

But I got a great idea for a salad — arugula dressed with oil and balsamic, and topped with oven-roasted oyster mushrooms, tossed in a bread crumb/parmesan mix. The artisanal cocktails were pretty cool, too, but I didn’t partake. (Gin. Haven’t been able to keep it down since an unfortunate incident at the age of 19.)

And then it was Tuesday, a swimming workout day, the first one after spring break. The pool is presided over by an older gentleman, a retired teacher who used to be a coach for one of the high-school teams. He told me he’d give me some stroke-refinement work this week, and so he did. Swimming is a repetitive motion, and chances are, once you start, you don’t change much. I always breathe on my left side, and have since I learned the freestyle, maybe 50 years ago. Today he had me do some one-arm drills, breathing on the other side. I am not ashamed to say I felt like I was drowning, even with fins on my feet. But I cannot deny that after a few lengths of this, I felt newly symmetrical. You do a thing, and then you do it differently, and suddenly you can do it better.

He also had me swim a few lengths just regular, but because fins were already on my feet and a pain to take off and put back on, I swam with them. And felt like an OUTBOARD MOTOR. These fish are onto something, I tell you.

And now I’m going to wrap this quickly, because I have yet more crap to do. So…

I’ve heard this many times: A person vehemently opposed to Obamacare is asked, “Well, would you support a plan that requires people to buy health insurance?” Sure, that’s OK. Apparently now it’s a thing.

Later, all.

Because I believe my little girl should be free to have her own life, and write about it someday, I mention her less here than I might be inclined to. But it seems noteworthy to mark milestones when they come along, and we had one this weekend.

Around Christmas, Kate and two of her friends formed a band. They call themselves the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, a reference you Quentin Tarantino fans should pick up on. Their vision was clear from the beginning: All girls, playing their own brand of psychedelic punk, not just a cover band. They worked hard through the long winter, practicing at one’s house (not ours, but the one whose guitar-playing father had already turned the garage into a studio). The search for a singer took a while, but eventually they found someone, and through this connection and that connection, they had their first gig Saturday.

It was a venue that appears in no Google searches, probably because it barely exists. It’s a brick building with one room and a boarded-up storefront, probably a former mom-and-pop grocery or barbershop or what-have-you. The neighborhood is terrible, as in your-car’s-safety-is-in-God’s-hands terrible, and there was enough light in the sky to see just how terrible as we drove up. These are the neighborhoods in Detroit that freak me out — the ones where the blight is well-entrenched and mostly still standing, but there are still many occupied houses. Imagine living next to a standing burned shell, or between two of them, for years on end. It might leave a person with a bad attitude.

“If only we had a film crew to capture this milestone in your early career,” I mused as we drove past a house with a collapsed front porch roof. Well, at least it’s pretty damn punk.

But we found the guy who runs the place, and with many, many misgivings, left the girls to do their own setup and sound check while we went to the Northern Lights Lounge for a drink and some hummus. We returned as the DVAS were just about ready to take the — well, it wasn’t quite a stage. More like a clearing in the corner.

And they did great, with a tight little set of originals, and two covers — the Jimmy Neutron theme song and, because we are where we are, some Stooges.

The place was so murky inside even my flash pictures couldn’t penetrate it. We’re going to have to go with arty here:

With all due respect to the venue, I hope they don’t play there anymore. They’re already good enough that they shouldn’t have to.

It was a busy Saturday. I drove to Lansing to meet with one of the Bridge columnists I edit, who was signing copies of an Upper Peninsula literary collection called “The Way North,” which I can recommend to any Yoopers looking for a taste of home. I’m still in the poetry section, but I’m liking it quite a lot.

Sunday? A 14-mile bike ride into the teeth of a chilly wind. WHERE IS WARMTH? WARMTH I REQUIRE.

Bloggage, then:

I’ve really become a fan of Neil Steinberg, who puts a lot more effort into his blog than I do. This one in particular.

As long as we’re talking Bridge, one of my faves of the weekend — a Vietnam-era vet objects to the word-inflation of “hero.” I totally agree.

Living paycheck-to-paycheck on $90K a year? You bet. Another great deep dive from the WashPost.

Hello, Monday. I’ve heard you can’t be trusted. But I hope everyone’s week is fine.

Well, Oberlin was splendid. It better be, for tuition, room, board and fees adding up to 60 grand a year. I wish I were kidding. Yes, I know only Chinese nationals pay full retail, but that is one hard swallow to even contemplate. One of my friends has a freshman at Michigan, and is getting no, zero, zip, nada discount of any sort, because their family income is over $100,000. While that’s certainly in the comfort zone, that’s two adults working, and the university thinks it’s enough that they should be able to swing a $25,000 annual expenditure with no help from the institution. Just think about that a while.

But the school was great. Small classes, wonderful facilities, impressive alumni. It wasn’t as gothic and grand as the University of Chicago, not in as lively a location as Tulane, but it had plenty of grandeur of its own, and then there’s the matter of the “E system” for designating bathrooms in the co-ed dorms. Signing up for the tour, in the basic information, Kate was allowed to indicate her gender as M, F or Other. If you’re transgender, you will find no fluffier nest, I bet.

Well, I wanted her to get a sense of what life might be like at a small, progressive liberal-arts school. Now she knows. (Expensive.)

And now it’s back to the grind. As I mentioned in yesterday’s comments, I have been relishing the Cliven Bundy news of the past few days; most of the story transpired without me — I’m paying attention to Michigan news more often these days — but it doesn’t take much to get caught up. So, it turns out this guy is less an embattled symbol of Western pluck than a welfare mooch? Noted. Loved this understated graf in the NYT:

He said he would continue holding a daily news conference; on Saturday, it drew one reporter and one photographer, so Mr. Bundy used the time to officiate at what was in effect a town meeting with supporters, discussing, in a long, loping discourse, the prevalence of abortion, the abuses of welfare and his views on race.

And then he launched into his “let me tell you what I know about the Negro” speech, and I think that will be that for the rancher with the big ol’ hat.

These sorts of nasty jerks are thick as thieves in Real America, especially in the wide open spaces. A normal person looks at southern Nevada, land so dry and scrubby you wouldn’t think it could support a prairie dog, and wonders what the hell people are thinking, running cows across it. The fact they’re doing so free of charge, or at below-market rates, merely rankles, until someone like Bundy or the National Review brings up the “government land” thing. As Dave Weigel points out, Bundy’s “cause” of transferring federal land to private hands has been dealt a setback by their accidental Palinesque spokesman. Good. It’s not “government land,” it’s public land, and let me remind you, the same people pushing for a selloff were the ones who were saying logging Yellowstone National Park would have have prevented the severe fires of 1988. Screw them. This land is your land, this land is my land. And I’m not selling, and Cliven Bundy ought to pay his damn bills and shut his stupid mouth.

No, he shouldn’t. Keep giving press conferences and sharing your colorful opinions, Cliven.

So, a quick bit of bloggage before we all pop off for the weekend, eh? As I think I’ve mentioned before, a particular local attorney has carpet-bombed the billboard and bus-sign market sector with advertising, and what advertising it is, featuring her platinum-blonde, Photoshopped-mouth self. She’s a Lebanese Christian immigrant, and specializes in personal injury, but also handles immigration affairs, and I can only imagine how her cupid-bow mouth and Muppet-like eye makeup is seen in the Arab community here, but boy, does she make serious bank. The Metro Times finally did the first serious profile of her I’ve yet read, and it’s pretty good. Apparently she’s a lovely person. Who knew?

Have a lovely weekend, then. Hope it’s warm where you are.

I know bad weather happens on Easter, but honestly, I can never think of any in my recent memory. Maybe it just doesn’t register, or fades quickly, like the pain of childbirth. Whatever the reason, we had a pretty glorious Easter, weather-wise, and most of the other -wises, in that we had good food and chocolate and ham and eggs. I’m sure Jeff was working overtime and then some, but it is the busiest day of the year in his line of work.

As for me, I saw a Muslim girl at the Eastern Market, wearing a hijab, with a pair of bunny ears on top. Our wonderful country of weirdness.

We went to Toledo to meet my sister-in-law for Easter lunch — it’s about halfway between us. Somehow we got to talking about this and that, and she said her employer-paid health insurance offers a rebate for people who exercise four times a week for 30 minutes. It’s self-reported, she said.

And how much of a rebate do they get? Fifteen bucks per quarter. It’s hardly worth lying on the reporting forms.

I was wondering about this because I read something recently about “the internet of things” — all the interconnected devices that make our lives easier. I think we’ve discussed the Next thermostat here before, but there are also all these fitness trackers like the Fitbit and Nike Fuel Band, et al. I got one of these for Christmas, the Misfit Shine, and I really like it. It meshes narcissism with tech geekery with data analysis. I cannot deny that I check it several times a day, and that it motivates me to walk more often in pursuit of the points that make it blink and send me attagirl messages via my phone. I’m on a long-term, low-pressure quest to chip away a few pounds, and stupid stuff like this makes a difference

I don’t have to spend much time on the website, though, to see a definite dark side — the bundled packages “ideal for office groups,” where everyone gets a wearable tracker and competes to reach fitness goals. Is it so crazy to imagine a time when your insurer wants to know how often you’re making the 1,000-point standard, and determines your premium based on it?

I think it’ll happen. And I think the technology will advance, but also the shadow economy that will collect your tracker and attach it to a dog for 45 minutes or so before dropping it back in your mailbox.

Honest, boss, I don’t know why I can’t lose these extra pounds. I’m working my ass off at the dog park.

Let’s not let fear of surveillance put a pall on a gentle Sunday night, fading into golden light with a dog nearby and a single hot dog on the grill. (After that midday feed, I don’t feel like eating much.) Time to skip to the bloggage:

A friend of mine here in Detroit is one of those urban farmers you’ve heard so much about — the one with the ducks. She had her annual Easter Eggstravaganza, and I know a few of you threw her some money so she could make it free for all the neighborhood kids. Here are the event photos, at least the series where every kid in attendance got his or her picture taken with a duckling. Don’t know if that was the same duck in every picture, but you get a sense of the fun that was had. Lots!

I liked parts of this essay about Elmore Leonard, which ran last week in Grantland’s Detroit series. The writer understands which books were the best (at least, he agrees with me). Other parts, not so much, but it’s a fine effort.

And that’s enough for a day when we’re all recovering from chocolate poisoning. Happy week ahead, all.

A friend of mine started inviting me to this yoga class on Saturdays. And I started going. I have to confess: I’m not much of a yoga girl. I find it impossible to clear my mind, let alone breathe shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip. I plugged my way through some hot yoga a year ago, but everything else has been oh-this-stuff-again.

But you can never step into the same river twice, as some yogi undoubtedly said at some point, and this time, I dunno, it sort of clicked. I couldn’t clear my mind — that is never going to happen, sorry — but the breathing suddenly made sense and I could feel how it’s not just fancy stretchin’ but actual isometric exercise. And then I downloaded Neal Pollack’s book of yoga essays — yep, it’s on the right rail — and long story short, today I ditched Gentle Flow for Power Lunch and oh, I fear I’ve stepped onto a train that is leaving the station and all I can do is hang on and wave until it crashes into Boring Station. It may already be there, in fact. I may be That Person at the party, but if I am, I’d really like to have that incredible posture that person always has. Not there yet.

Yoga is fucking awesome. Let that be the last thing I say about it.

No, this: The other day I was lying in bed, reading, and stretched my leg out at a strange angle, just for the feels, and it not only went there, it went beyond. This is how they hook you, those yoga people.

So, how was everybody’s Tuesday? Mine? Cold and snowy, but I got out in it anyway. The snowfall finally broke the last record and I’ll give it this: It was pretty. But now it should go away. Back in the 60s by Thursday.

One of my neighbors had a pet raccoon. She said the family came down one morning and found the animal had escaped its cage, wrecked the kitchen, and was sitting on its fat ass, legs spread and an open bag of marshmallows between them, dipping them one by one into the canister of sugar. (Not sure if I believe every detail of that.) Anyway, things worked out better for her than it did for this girl. Mauled by a raccoon as a baby, now having her face reconstructed.

Don’t keep raccoons as pets.

I haven’t been watching CNN since the Malaysian plane went down, but apparently they’ve gone mad? New York magazine has a roundup, with video links.

Happy hump day, all. See you tomorrow.

Roy had a post the other day that led to the American Spectator, which led me down a rabbit hole of weirdness and nostalgia. I started reading the Spectator in the ’80s, when I would filch it from the editorial page’s mailbox when I was bored. It was the first magazine I read that made me think, “These folks are not only wrong, but insane.” I think it was the column opposing curb cuts for wheelchairs that did it.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing down the rabbit hole was this entry in the long-running — and apparently endlessly amusing to readers — Ben Stein’s Diary. The rabbit hole has since been gated (maybe it won’t be to you), but there was a jaw-dropping passage in it. In the context of a long rant about the awful Barack Obama, he laments that California is dying of thirst, and how can this be? Michigan has more than enough water; why is there not a great aqueduct running from Michigan to California? Why? WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THIS ONCE-GREAT COUNTRY THAT WE CAN’T SEND MICHIGAN’S WATER TO CALIFORNIA?

How is it possible to be this clueless? To answer the question, and with all due respect to our California readers: Because any number of Michigan residents would dynamite an aqueduct to water California’s golf courses, or go anywhere else. You’re welcome, Ben Stein. You putz.

So, what a Monday. Woke up to howling winds, and walked to the bus stop in what seemed like a gale, the sort of wind that makes you lean into it, so you don’t get knocked over. It was coming up from the south, and I calculated that I would be disembarking and walking north to my office. So after the usual rattle-bump ride downtown, I stepped off the bus and turned north. Caught a blast to the face that had grit in it, because this is of course the gritty city.

At least it was warm. Was. The temperature is dropping like a rock, and it is supposed to snow overnight. Snow.

When I got to work, my co-worker said, “Did you see the cloud of grime over the city, coming in?” See it? I tasted it.

And now it’s Monday night, and I survived. Tuesday? We shall see.

With 1.9 more inches of snow, we can break the all-time record. Part of me wants to see it happen. The other part — the biggest part — says fuck that noise.

So, a little bloggage, but not much, because I want to go to bed early.

Tom and Lorenzo on last night’s “Mad Men.” The part about the Helter Skelter coincidence is a little unsettling, but that’s not the first place I heard it. Let’s assume Matthew Weiner will continue to be all obtuse ‘n’ stuff. That’s a little too on the nose.

I’m about halfway through this NYT magazine cover story about two lost artists of early 20th-century blues, and I’m enjoying it very much. It looks like the online presentation is the usual bells-and-whistles stuff. Nice.

Is that my faraway bed calling? I believe it is. See you Tuesday. Oh, it’s Tuesday already? You don’t say.

Every time we have computer trouble, I find myself both irritated (haven’t we reached the point in the internet that it should just flippin’ work?) and — if I solve the problem — amazingly satisfied. Problem-solving has never been my most marketable skill, so it feels good to do deductive reasoning from time to time. Is it this? Let’s take it out of the chain and see what happens. Is it this? Yes.

It was the router, the ugly-ass Cisco that wanted me to install all its stupid software, added a Guest network and couldn’t find the damn printer until J.C. passed through town and brought it to heel.

The new one’s an Apple. Yes, I paid the premium. My reward? I plugged it in, and it worked. The lagniappe? It’s pretty. Good enough for me.

So, on Wednesday I experimented with what the urban planners call “last-mile” bike commuting. That’s where you ride your bike to the bus stop, put it on the rack on the front of the bus, commute to the urban center, take the bike off and ride to your office. It worked swimmingly both ways, unless you are the sort who would be bothered by the raving homeless guy who lingered at the downtown stop for a time. Bonus: I had a bike for lunch, and a friend and I rode down to Eastern Market for a slice at Supino’s, the best pizza in this or many other towns. The crust is so thin you can eat it entirely without guilt, because they don’t lard the cheese on, either.

And then it was back to the office, passing between a major-league baseball park and the housing project where the Supremes grew up, now abandoned and undergoing demolition. All under china-blue skies. That is what I call a lunch hour.

The only potential sour note in this is the lack of a rack at my office building, and the management’s refusal to let me bring it upstairs. I can’t even lock it in the vestibule, which meant I had to secure it to a parking meter outside the front door. I invested in a bomb-ass lock, but nothing works all the time. That’s when I rely on my time-honored strategy of never having the nicest stuff. Today, a woman rode past me on a racing bike that looked like it had been imported from the 23rd century. If I recognize her blond ponytail, she’s a local amateur racer and probably needs it, but I wouldn’t want to leave it anywhere without a 50-pound anchor secured to, I dunno, maybe a car.

OK, so bloggage for the weekend?

Here’s the WashPost Wonkblog thing I posted in comments Wednesday, for you non-comments people. It explains why ophthalmologists are among the highest-billing Medicare doctors out there. Spoiler: Pharmaceuticals.

I guess some people won’t be watching Stephen Colbert when he takes over for David Letterman.

And then Jesus said, “Take my wife. Please.” Can’t wait to see how this plays out.

Great weekend, all. And happy birthday, J.C. Burns! You make this thing happen every single day.

Yesterday: Grilled salmon and spinach souffle. Today: Macaroni and cheese with bacon crumbled over the top. You can’t be healthy and fancy all the time. Especially with a chill rain falling from the heavens. Cool spring evenings practically cry out for mac and cheese. And there was a salad, because we’re not animals, y’know.

I grew up with a mother who worked full-time — rare-ish at the time — and who commuted on the bus. I would hear her footfalls coming up the front walk at 5:30 or so and look forward to her sunny presence in the house, even though it was, for her, merely the beginning of the second shift, which she did uncomplainingly. Tonight I thought of her as I walked home from my own stop, which lets me off about the same distance from home as my mom was from ours. That’s what started me thinking of mac and cheese with bacon. We shouldn’t express love with food, but face it? Food = love, many times.

Not that I wish to start off this work week all navel-starey. But it IS raining.

Here’s a story that’s been floating around for a while, about a young doctor who started acting erratically a few weeks back, and disappeared. A body appeared in an Indiana lake near where she was last seen, and the early signs are that it’s her. What makes it all the more tragic is that all signs are that she had some sort of psychotic mental illness, and what kind of doctor was she training to be? A psychiatrist. How is it that a woman who’s made it through med school, who’s chosen a specialty and is presumably studying it intensively, doesn’t recognize the symptoms in herself? Although maybe she did:

Twitter messages gave investigators clues to her state of mind in the eight months before she disappeared after leaving work Dec. 5. Her Twitter account, filled with 20,000 tweets, indicate she dealt with hallucinations and that they were growing worse. In September, she described a troubling episode: “My mind melted,” she tweeted about an earlier psychotic episode. “Everything went haywire. Signals got crossed and my mind started telling me that everything is a lie and I’m crazy.”

Her family said she was never diagnosed with mental illness, but siblings and her ex-husband were troubled by her behavior, they said.

“I begged her to get help. She didn’t want to be branded,” said her ex-husband, Smiley Calderon of Orange, Calif., of a diagnosis that could derail the career of the smart, focused woman with a medical degree and doctorate in biochemistry. Patrick also has a bachelor’s in theology.

A tragedy. Less so was the death of Mickey Rooney, who, I was amused to hear, was christened “Andy Hard-on” by Lana Turner, one of his many, many conquests. I recall him in most of his biggest roles — “National Velvet,” the awful Japanese caricature in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” etc. — but what I find most memorable was a role he played late in his career, as the wordless, grotesque clown in “Babe: Pig in the City.”

I have a friend who absolutely hated that movie, but I? Well, I loved it. You don’t always find children’s movies that most people would call “dark,” but there you are. It’s a train wreck, but a wonderful one, and Rooney, as the wrangler of a strange, dark vaudeville troupe of apes and his own mime-like clown. His part isn’t big, but a key part of the strangeness that pervades the whole film.

I’m the only one who liked that movie, I swear. I can imitate many of the animals’ voices, and sometimes will say to Kate, “My people tied me into a bag and threw me in the water.” She loves it.

Finally, what is the story behind this story? A sticky-fingered thief, or a dealer in stolen goods? Hoosiers, report.