Whoa, but I owe you guys a lot, don’t I? Sorry. I’ve been distracted, and in the final analysis, hey: It’s summer. When someone asks me if I’d like to spend an evening drinking on a patio and listening to music, I’m not going to say, sorry, gotta blog. We’ve had a pretty excellent summer so far, and this is one where I’m keenly aware of its brevity.

But before I go any further, let me just say how grateful I am that you guys are willing to carry the freight when I’m off seeing “World War Z.” It helps.

So, speaking of which — “World War Z,” that is. I liked it! Maybe my expectations were too low, but I thought it was far better than the weak two stars most critics gave it. The opening scenes of the initial zombie attacks were fucking terrifying, impossible to watch without thinking of any other disaster that could get people running through the streets and looting grocery stores. The later stuff, in which Brad Pitt wanders the world in search of zombie patient zero, weren’t as good, but they were good enough. And may I just say? I appreciated the PG-13. I’m tired of watching limbs being lopped off with squirting arteries. I’m just as happy to have them lopped off out of the frame. I understand that lopping was done; I do not need a surgical tutorial.

All the way home from the theater, I snapped my jaws, zombie-style. Everyone else in the car got a little tired of it.

As for Hooters? It was fun. The waitresses were all adorable, very early-’60s Playmate wholesome. Lotsa smiles and friendliness to man and woman, child and adult, alike. Kate — in the middle of looking for her first paying job — said, “Should I work here?”

Alan said, “I don’t think they’re looking for Daria.” Although personally, I think that would be hilarious — a Daria Hooters waitress. (Link added for you non-MTV fans.)

As for the food? Eh. The unanimous verdict: “This is not the best chicken sandwich I’ve had in my life, but far from the worst.”

So. In addition to all the other crap going on this week, I was in Ann Arbor for a meeting Thursday morning, stepped into the ladies’, went to sit and heard a heart-clutching plunk — yep, after years of laughing at people whose phones land in the toilet, it finally happened to me. It slipped out of the back pocket of my pants. No, I don’t have a waterproof case. Yes, I’ve been meaning to get one. Yes, I immediately spun around and snatched it out — thank god I hadn’t peed yet. The prognosis is still iffy, but it’s looking good. A day in a bag of rice seems to have worked its magic, although all through the meeting, Siri was drunk on toilet water. It kept flashing her message screen, and saying things like, “Nancy, I’m sorry but I can’t find that location in Africa. Should I search again?” or “Nancy, there is no Wide Avenue in Ann Arbor.” Very distracting. But I think she’s sobered up. Cross all fingers.

So, some bloggage? Yep.

Remember Tom Nardone, who runs the Mower Gang, which everyone and his brother, including me, has written about? Now the full truth is revealed: How Tom actually makes his living when he isn’t mowing parks. HE SELLS SEX TOYS. ON THE INTERNET The walk through his warehouse was one of the highlights of that assignment; it reminded me that very early on in my residency here I almost answered an ad to write catalog copy for him, but the money was too low. Everyone who tours PriveCo is offered a gift from the clearance shelf, but I couldn’t accept, and besides, who wants a purple plastic dildo with a rheostat dial on the bottom? There’s a reason it’s on the clearance shelf.

I wonder what Anthony Bourdain was offered.

My entertainment came from watching the pickers in the warehouse, filling mail orders. There’s just something about watching a 300-pound man (named Tiny) plucking penis-shaped chip-and-dip trays off a shelf to mail to a bachelorette party in some distant state. It makes you happy you went into journalism.

Also, this: Stacy Keibler has the best stems in the world. I’d kill for legs like hers. How does she do it?

Have a great weekend, all.

In the never-ending stream of Excuses for Lame Blogging, add this:

Tonight the three of us, plus one of Kate’s friends, had two peak experiences:

1) First visit to a Hooters, ever; and

2) “World War Z.”

I have to say, I enjoyed them both. And both beat swimming the Detroit river.

I promise better tomorrow.

EDIT: What. The HELL.

Today was…a day. A long one, with many events happening in it. It included driving through three howling thunderstorms, the kind where you put your wipers on top speed and still lose sight of the taillights in front of you between swishes. In sane parts of the world, this is when drivers slow down, because you never know where the puddle lies that will send you hydroplaning into eternity. Also, because it’s good to know where the driver ahead of you is, and when they’re disappearing in the course of a second, tops, it’s wise to slow down.

So of course Michigan’s insane motorists were blowing past me at 60-plus. Passing on the right, because it’s INTOLERABLE that this woman is driving 50 in what is, after all, just some rain.

OK, but enough of that. A north wind is blowing away the lingering heat and it might be in the 50s by morning. Scratch the early a.m. swim workout and pencil in cycling. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I was away from the net most of the day, and so I missed the Anthony Weiner dick-pic story AND the royal baby’s unveiling. Fortunately, the internet kept up. Gents, when should you send a lady a dick pic and hey, it’s a royal baby.

I long ago lost track of the national punditry about Detroit’s bankruptcy, but Jonathan Chait got off a good line in his piece. It’s the last one in this graf:

Ze’ev Chafets, a native of the Detroit suburb of Pontiac, borrowed “Devils Night” for the title of his 1991 book about the city and its political culture. He compared Detroit to a liberated colony, whose politics was defined by continued resentment of the departed white occupier. White and black politics were locked into mutually reinforcing pathologies. Whites fled the city, blamed blacks for its destruction and, in many cases, gloated in its failures. Hostility toward the white suburbs shaped Detroit’s politics, which frequently amounted to race-to-the-bottom demagogic contests to label the opposing candidate a secret tool of white interests, with the predictable result on the quality of government. The worse Detroit got, the more whites hated and feared, fueling black racial paranoia, which made the city worse still. (Some national commentators recently suggested that Mitt Romney be brought in to turn around the city, which is a bit like suggesting that Benjamin Netanyahu would make a great Prime Minister for the Palestinians — hey, he’s from around there!)

Chafets’ book is very good, and I’ve read it twice — once before we moved here and once after. Yes, he wrote a fawning bio of Rush fucking Limbaugh, but “Devil’s Night and other true tales of Detroit” is worth your time.

I have to duck out now, however, as I’m a) exhausted, on several levels; and b) out of time. Let’s try for more tomorrow.

This summer hasn’t been dry like the last one. In fact, as we’ve all been complaining about lately, sometimes the humidity has been suffocating. Since I’m walking a dog again, I’m paying more attention to the lawns and hedgerows around the neighborhood. And this is what I’m seeing:

Toadstools. Everywhere. One of my Facebook friends uploaded a photo of something that looked like an inflamed penis with extra-awful gonorrhea — bright red, oozing something brown at the top. “All over the lawn,” she notes. Lovely.

Fortunately, the dog has no interest in them. But I’m seeing all sorts of varieties. I know very little about mushrooms, fungi and the rest of it. I know they’re not morels, though.

Want some more pictures? Here’s something shipped along by a friend, who found it in his mother’s belongings:

You northeast Indiana journos will recognize the unmistakable, but un-bylined, prose style of the late Jim Barbieri. He could always get excited by a good fire.

I was out in the world today, hanging with a couple of former G-men for a story. We came across one of the Detroit Blight Authority projects. Man, these people aren’t screwing around:

They cleared a sizable block, a truly cursed one, plagued not only with empty, burned-out houses but also an ad hoc dump. The authority cleared the houses, cleared the trash, cleared much of the brush and trees. The plan is to grade it all when it’s done, then plant with a special grass/wildflower mix that doesn’t grow over a foot high. You get a sense of how much they’ve taken down by the pile of wood chips behind it. It’s not a total scalp job; there are still plenty of trees left. But there will be fewer places to hide for drug-using, trick-turning and other malfeasance. The sound of that industrial chipper was something to hear. The proprietor of a drug house nearby certainly seemed impressed by it.

And with that, I’m tapped. Slept badly, but up extra early to at least get a workout in. Which I did, but I’m paying with gritty eyes at 10 p.m. Some bloggage:

Remember crack babies? A long-term study on them just ended. Guess what it found? Ahem:

The team has kept tabs on 110 of the 224 children originally in the study. Of the 110, two are dead – one shot in a bar and another in a drive-by shooting – three are in prison, six graduated from college, and six more are on track to graduate. There have been 60 children born to the 110 participants.

The years of tracking kids have led Hurt to a conclusion she didn’t see coming.

“Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine,” Hurt said at her May lecture.

I am shocked, shocked to learn the state of Indiana lies to its residents. But not really:

But an honest analysis gets in the way of politics, particularly when we are talking about an ambitious Republican governor like Mike Pence.

One can only hope that, at some point, the public at large will begin to ‘get’ the games and lies opponents of healthcare reform have been playing ever since the enactment of the Affordable Care Act. When you have a situation like what we are seeing in Indiana, it becomes difficult to understand how anyone could avoid acknowledging that the disingenuous behavior of the anti-Obamacare forces truly knows no bounds.

Taking my gritty eyes to bed.

The president gave a few remarks about race last Friday. They were excellent, in my opinion, but perhaps you feel otherwise. Discuss if you want, but I’m more interested in picking grammar nits.

This nit in particular:

Along the same lines, I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if it — if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations.

I see this all the time. I think whoever transcribed the president’s extemporaneous (yep, no Teleprompter!) remarks should have written “defuse.” You defuse a bomb, which is what an altercation is. Diffuse, as a verb, means to spread over a wide area. No one gets this, and yes, people, it drives me crazy.

Everyone must have their own areas of expertise, where mistakes made by others rankle more. After the Newtown massacre, I was struck by how many gun nuts fixated on minor errors regarding gun technology in others’ comments: Anyone who doesn’t know the difference between an automatic and semi-automatic is not someone we need to listen to. Just the other day, I saw a reference to “a male horse” in news copy, and thought congratulations, you know what a dick looks like. We’ll handle the tricky stallion vs. gelding question tomorrow.

I want to be more aware of these things. And I want the world to learn the difference between defuse and diffuse.

So, did everyone have a good weekend? I feel like mine was all full of Win, as we somehow managed to not lose power after a series of rip-roaring storms blew through Friday night. I made a pound cake and a cucumber salad. Ate ribs. Enjoyed a good time on a patio with citronella candles. Did a little work. The older I get, the more fun I have with stuff like this. I can’t believe there are people who would rather go to P. Diddy’s white party in the Hamptons than a decent backyard barbecue in the rest of the world. But that’s me.

Bloggage? Sure. Bob Garfield winds up and lets ABC have it, for hiring Jenny McCarthy to co-host “The View.”

Alan says he sees these trucks rolling around town, moving giant aluminum ingots here and there. The NYT explains how Goldman Sachs is gaming regulations to manipulate the market in its favor.

Finally, I knew this guy, via friends. He was a husband and father, warm, funny and smart, as well as fat and diabetic. In recent years, he had a health scare, and cleaned up his act — dropped 40 pounds, got his diabetes under control, started going to the gym daily. In this country, at this moment in time, such an accomplishment isn’t truly real until you’ve cemented it with a public display — a road race or other athletic contest. (Newspapers have these stories on a user key, I’m convinced; they’re positive and inspirational. There was one in the Freep just last week.) So, he entered one of those trendy mud obstacle courses, finished, went to the medical tent, collapsed and died.

This is not to blame Rick for what happened to him, or the race for being the venue. It’s just to say that maybe improving one’s own health, losing weight and one’s bad habits, is reward enough. Maybe that’s the lesson here. Two girls lost their father, a wife lost her husband, and no participant’s ribbon will bring him back.

Be careful out there. And have a good week.

Sorry for the no-show yesterday. We had to go to Kate’s summer camp one last time, so she could play her final concert with the camp’s international jazz ensemble:

They had a concert Tuesday night at a club in Detroit, then Wednesday at camp, as recruitment for next year’s European travelers. As you can see, it’s your standard big-band setup, and they played a repertoire of classics from the genre. The highlights, for most of the crowd, were the finale – “Sing, Sing, Sing,” which they KILLED – and just before that there was a Dixieland strut:

When Kate was unpacking last week, she pulled a tambourine from her bag. “What’s that for?” I asked. She waved me off — “Oh, this…thing.”

I found out, Tuesday night, what the thing was. As she played an electric instrument, she needed something else for the walkabout. And so, TOTALLY EMBARRASSED TO DEATH, that’s what she played.

She really doesn’t mind being in the back line. Not much of a showboat, this one.

It was almost 10 when we left the sunset coast of Michigan, 1:30 when we pulled in the driveway. So no blog.

Well, the showdown between the Detroit emergency manager and the city’s creditors has come to this: Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, filed late Thursday, the largest ever. As this is, as we say in the trade, a developing story, I’ll keep my mouth shut. However, let’s all keep a good thought for at least one of our commenting community, who is a city employee and probably feels his nearing retirement is on a fast-descending elevator at the moment.

Just to give you a sense of the scale involved, here you go:

A Chapter 9 filing would leave the restructuring to (Detroit emergency manager Kevyn) Orr and a federal bankruptcy judge and could take years, experts say, despite hopes by the governor and Orr that the case can be wrapped up in a year. A bankruptcy judge could trump the state constitution by slashing retiree pensions, ripping up contracts and paying creditors roughly a dime on the dollar for unsecured claims worth $11.45 billion.

Detroit, always blazing a path. Just not the one you always want. This is a good analysis of the stakes — very high.

Any more bloggage before we stumble out of this suffocating week? Just this: Lewis Black, rallying the New York troops against the menace that is Texas.

Heat is supposed to break today. God, let’s hope so.

Hard to describe just how miserable it is outside at the moment. I imagine those of you who live in Louisiana, south Florida or some other tropical-summer shithole know what I’m talking about, but: Man. All the windows are steamed, and it’s 9:30 p.m. I guess it’s been this humid and hot before, but every time it happens, it seems like the first time.

Wendy and I went walking, and I’m sorry we did, as 20 minutes of slow ambling left me draining sweat for maybe the fourth time today. It should break by the weekend. Let’s hope so.

I’ve been thinking today about passive aggression, and how much I hate it.

It goes back to the police dispatcher in the Zimmerman case, who, when Zimmerman said he was planning to get a little closer to this kid in the hoodie, said, “OK, we don’t need you to do that.” Some have interpreted this as the dispatcher saying not to get out of the car, which I think is what s/he was indeed trying to say. But it’s hard for people to give direct orders.

Part of the cringing humor of “Office Space” came from the boss, Bill Lumbergh, played by Gary Cole, and his oozy, greasy passive aggression: Oh, oh, and I almost forgot. Ahh, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too… He never says, “Come in on Sunday.” He says, “I’m gonna need you go come in Sunday.” No wonder Zimmerman ignored him. I hate that shit.

Oh, why are we even talking about this. Jenny McCarthy has been added to the cast of “The View,” a passive-aggressive move if I ever heard one. The New Yorker blog has more, but it’s pretty clear to anyone who has been paying attention. Good to know network television has no problem hiring a health crackpot.

“We store a lot of anger in our thighs,” and other ludicrous things said by yoga teachers. Not necessarily true, but oh well.

Mitch Daniels, now a president of a major American university.

Finally, remember Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic?” Remember how wrong it was? Well, someone fixed it.

Have a good Wednesday. I’ll be traveling, with sketchy posting.

I can’t believe I was ever naive enough to think, when I moved in with Alan, “I’m so glad this is happening. Now I’ll only have to make the bed every other day.”

Alan, like lots of people, thinks of bed-making as the ultimate Sisyphean task: What’s the point in doing it when you’ll have to do it again tomorrow? Whereas I believe even a spotlessly clean room looks dirty if there’s an unmade bed in it. (Unless it’s occupied by someone.)

My mother insisted I make my bed every day, and I remember what a pain it was in the time of chenille bedspreads and other troublesome fabrics. You had to get everything smooth underneath, then bring up the spread and laboriously tuck it under the pillow. It looked neat until someone sat on it, sometimes moments later.

Then came the era of the down comforter, an unheard-of luxury in my youth. Then came the fiberfill comforter, for the allergic. We all learned what a “duvet” is. Bed-making is now a matter of yanking up the sheets, then yanking up the duvet, which fluffs itself up and settles back down, not precisely straight but that’s OK, that’s the point. If you have any sort of technique at all, you can make a bed in a matter of seconds. No, I don’t truck in sham pillows and accent pillows and all the rest of that crap. Yank, yank, position pillows, done.

So of course, no one in my house will do it. I can occasionally threaten Kate into compliance, but she is her father’s daughter.

All of which is to say that I just washed the duvet cover and had to put it back on — ALWAYS IT’S ME, WHO DOES THESE THINGS — and thought this must be the only part of bed-making any more that’s difficult.

Do you make your bed? Why or why not?

And how was your weekend? The rain let up and the heat moved in. I did a little yard work until I got dizzy. Walked the dog. Rode a fast 15-miler. Baked a cherry pie, grilled a pork tenderloin. Basked in the glory of summer.

And I do not have any specific thoughts on the Zimmerman trial. Like Eric Zorn, I see enough ambiguity in the evidence that I find reasonable doubt a disappointing, but understandable, conclusion. What I mostly believe is that we’re headed for another round of culture warrin’, and I’m not looking forward to that. I also think so-called stand-your-ground laws need a thorough rethinking. (And yes, I understand this wasn’t part of the defense.) I hate the idea that someone who considers himself a neighborhood guardian goes out armed with a weapon loaded with hollow-point bullets.

The worst of all is, there’s a huge part of the country that looks at the death of an unarmed teenager and shrugs.

We could talk about the breathless NYT story on campus hook-up culture.

Or we could all chuckle over Hank Stuever’s very clever pairing of “The Newsroom” and “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” in his Sunday column.

Busy week ahead. Enjoy yours.

Asking whether Mercury is in retrograde — it is — may be only a slightly more ridiculous way to ask what the hell is going on and why is everything so screwed up, but it works for me. Let’s run down the woes, shall we?

Plane crash in San Francisco
Train crash in Quebec
Massacre in Egypt

And so on. My car required a heart-clutchingly expensive repair to the steering. On a bike ride last Saturday, both my partner and I got flat tires. Everyone I know is falling off ladders or bonking their heads on open cabinet doors. The dog was in a lather all day, begging to go outside. Where it was a mere 88 degrees with tropical humidity.

I had no ride to pick up the car, but I did have a bicycle (flat fixed). An enormous storm was building in the southwest, so I set out to get there as quickly as possible on an extremely unpleasant route through a bike-hostile suburb. Which I hate. But I made good time, paid the heart-clutching bill, threw the trusty bike in the back and thought, you may not be the best way to get around town in January, but you haven’t cost me $1,700 lately.

All of which adds up to: I am tired. So not much from me tonight. Kate and I saw “The Kings of Summer” tonight, an uneven but sweet film about three boys who run away from home and move into a house of their own construction in an Ohio glade. The Plain Dealer newspaper boxes and Berea fire trucks identified the venue as northeasterly, but a climactic scene with a copperhead had me rolling my eyes — I don’t think they’re found anywhere near Cleveland. That’s one of those things an Ohio girl knows: There’s very little to fear in the Ohio woods, although once a DNR photographer was killed by a rutting buck, who gored him.

So, bloggage?

The look on this woman’s face as she listens to the Indiana governor is simply priceless.

The new Google Maps app ad was shot here. Our crazy town.

Five theories for why Justin Bieber hates Bill Clinton.

And with that, I head for the sack and hope Thursday is a bit less expensive.

I was reading some of your comments about watching cable-news coverage of the plane crash, and reflecting that this was one breaking-news story I didn’t watch live. I guess it was a conscious decision, except that it was one of those days when it didn’t seem worth spoiling a lovely summer evening to watch cable news.

And based on what some of you were saying about the bleating idiots doing standups on a weekend plane crash, I’m glad I did.

I wonder if it’s the summer that’s doing it. I feel every day passing, and I’m less likely to say, sure, let’s watch the plane crash. It seems so much more efficient to check the NYT for the important facts, feel briefly bad for the people on the plane, and then not miss Wolf Blitzer, et al, repeating the same old bullshit.

Is this how normal people do it? I should try to be more normal.

Today wasn’t one of those magical summer days, unless you enjoy thunderstorms, which I do, but not that much. Alan came home sick, and it rained. I stared at a blinking cursor, and didn’t get out for a bike ride. Which means?

Bloggage!

This is a wonderful story, as Hank noted in his recommendation, one that starts as one thing and ends as something else. Miss Teen America goes out for a wilderness camping trip. Read and enjoy.

So, a bunch of people saw “Louder Than Love” over the weekend, and afterward a Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame guy suggested a Kickstarter to save the building. Poisonous nostalgia strikes again.

R rated, but only words, and funny ones: The comment section for every article ever written about intimate grooming.

Weiner-Spitzer. Because Weiner-Spitzer.

Sorry for the lameness. Didn’t sleep well last night. I plan to sleep fabulously tonight.