An all-bloggage day today. I have some photos to dump, so I can delete them from my phone. They actually pertain to a few recent topics. Like? Hair care:

Yes, yet another sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-niche of the shampoo market. Shampoo and conditioner is like snack food — there’s always a new brand extension. I found Mixed Chicks in this section at Target:

The other day I came downstairs and found this lying on the windowsill. Like a turd:

It’s a greeting card. For someone you don’t like, I guess.

Here’s a good animation: Watch the nation get fat, over the last 25 years. I wish I could pause this thing and figure out when Indiana briefly backslid toward thinness, then marched on to Fat City.

Goobing Detroit — tracking the decline of city neighborhoods via the street-view scenes of two search engines, in 2009 and 2012.

If you’re watching “Mad Men,” but not reading T-Lo’s Mad Style dissections of the costumes, you’re not watching “Mad Men.” They’re long — part one and part two, here — and sometimes find things that I’m not entirely sure were put in the scene on purpose, but they’re always worth a read.

The other day I had to ask one of my columnists the other day if she intended to use “awesome” twice in one paragraph. Instead of awesome is for her, and a lot of others.

Oh, sweet weekend. You were here much sooner than I thought, but here you are.

Monday is usually my Lansing day, but this week it was Tuesday. Ate lunch with some economists (story planning), at which I learned that economists know the proper plural to “equilibrium” (equilibria).

With the lunch, and the commute, and all the rest of it, it made for a 12-hour day, however, after which all I really wanted to do was pour a glass of wine, grill hot dogs for me and the kid, then have another glass of wine and watch “Top of the Lake.”

However, I have some bloggage you might like:

I’ve been neglecting the work plugs, so please, click and give ’em some love — Bridge had a nice package on guns in Michigan today. You can start with the mainbar here, and click through to the sidebars. Don’t miss this one, though, about a gun-shop owner who’s found himself a frequent theft target.

Also, I’m now the editor of a new sub-section of Bridge, a Sunday commentary section we’re calling Brunch with Bridge. The first two are on the state’s most precious natural resource, H2O.

When you’re done helping keep me employed, you might enjoy this David Simon yarn about an old joke from “The Wire,” featuring a Baltimore Orioles pitcher recently lost to us.

Sorry Michigan didn’t make it in Monday night’s championship game. I did my part, by ignoring it entirely; any interest in my part in any sporting team is the kiss of death.

I hear the game was pretty good, though. Maybe next year.

Have a good Wednesday, all.

I was as surprised as he was. Nice camouflage.

A former mayor of Columbus liked to say he did his best thinking in the shower, and was fond of sharing the many steamy ideas he got there. When I’m in the shower, I am very nearsighted and have a hard enough time remembering all my ablutionary chores — shampoo, condition, shave legs, exfoliate, etc. — to do much thinking. But as I have all those labels close to my face, I do take a moment to read them. And I have to tell you: Wow.

I used to use a brand of Costco shampoo that promised my hair was being hydrated with essence of kelp. Which makes it good for hair why? Because it grows in water? What is in its essence that would be good for hair? Is kelp oily? I don’t think so. Maybe all those otters who frolic in it leave behind lanolin or something.

I don’t use that shampoo anymore, having switched to another Costco brand. It, too, offers moisture, but not from kelp.

Perhaps kelp is in the Moisture Nutrient Complex(tm), or one of the Pure Natural Extracts. Hard to say, but it does have gentle cleansers and it is sulfate-free. Do note the long list of natural extracts in the actual ingredient list. Is this where people who finish with non-dean’s list degrees in chemistry end up?

Here’s my conditioner. It makes me laugh:

It has three naturally derived extracts that penetrate the hair, each to its own layer. Now there’s a trick, and I want to meet the man or woman who made it happen.

“Members of the board, I’m telling you, this triple-extract formula promises a breakthrough in hair-conditioning technology. We will penetrate the core, moisturize the middle and wrap the exterior of every strand! And it will be pleasantly scented, and look like a beige goo! We will transform the daily shampoo into hair therapy!”

Only it would all be in German, because Neutrogena. No, I’m thinking of Nivea. Neutrogena is based in Los Angeles.

But for total label nonsense, it’s hard to beat a brand that once carried the hair-and-makeup room for “Project Runway.”

Yes, TRESemmé, where the product instructions are presented as a friendly bit of advice from the brand’s lead stylist. I also love that “this product” paragraph, with its bold 97-percent-less-breakage claim, carefully asterisked, which presents the comparison: “vs. non-conditioning shampoo alone.” OK.

I once read a simple explanation of what soap is: A fat that strips another fat. A Lebanese man at Eastern Market sells this wonderful olive oil, and has lately started offering olive-oil soap, unscented, for $5 a bar. I think I’m going to buy one. Maybe use it on my hair.

One final note. I use this stuff, and like it:

Just soap with scratchy stuff in it. I loooove to exfoliate.

Do we have some bloggage? We do.

Those of you on Facebook? Stop clicking stuff to see what happens when the bear reaches the hiker standing on the cliff, or naming a city with no E in it. Like so much of Facebook, it’s a scam. “Like-farming.”

A great, funny read from Monica Hesse on Gwyneth Paltrow’s new book, including two recipes! For a black-bean chili and a new condiment called Spicy Cashew Moment:

The book opens with Gwyneth describing her quest to clean out her system and become more healthy after having a migraine she mistook for a stroke. (She thought, she says, that she was going to die.) Her doctor prescribes a diet: “No coffee, no alcohol, no dairy, no eggs, no sugar, no shellfish, no deepwater fish, no potatoes, no tomatoes, no bell pepper, no eggplant, no wheat, no meat, no soy.”

It’s fascinating to witness a cookbook composed from a place of such intense deprivation — a purported goal of simple nutrition transformed into a complicated Gwynethian odyssey. I’ve been a vegetarian for a decade; blindfolded, I can differentiate between soy, almond, rice and hemp milks. But my day of cooking with Gwyneth sent me to heretofore uncharted crannies of Whole Foods Market.

I keep seeing recipes calling for hemp seeds. Where the hell do you find those? Are they even legal in all 50 states?

The longer I work among the data-mad, the less susceptible I am to emotion-based arguments, but this one touched me, even if it did come via Maureen Dowd:

Scalia uses the word “homosexual” the way George Wallace used the word “Negro.” There’s a tone to it. It’s humiliating and hurtful.

I guess we should be cheered, because no one says “sodomite” anymore. At least not from the bench.

Happy Thursday to all. It’s supposed to be warm. Halle-freakin’-lujah.

Alan’s been auto editor for more than a year now, and one perk of the job is, he gets to take a car home from time to time. By “time to time,” I mean maybe twice a month, and he usually chooses Wednesdays. That’s his day to pick up Kate at her weekly jazz practice, and they like to listen to satellite radio together; the new cars all have it. The models the companies send to the automotive press tend to have, as we like to say, “alllll the shit on it,” expensive and loaded, the kind we’d never buy. The Buick Enclave we had over the weekend cost close to what I make in a year, at least with allll the shit on it.

But it was a luxurious ride, and if nothing else, cars like this tell me what is coming in my next one, once the technology trickles down to the lower price points.

The dashboards on some of these rides are more daunting than a 747’s, with baffling switches that control things like heated steering wheels and other crap. But we’ve become fond of a couple of doo-dads, specifically the backup camera and the blind-spot indicator.

You don’t have those on your car? The former not only shows you what’s behind you, but also draws a little lane with green/yellow/red zones — sometimes with audio cues when you get too close to cars and walls and pedestrians. And the blind-spot indicator is pure genius, a yellow lamp that lights in your outside rear-view mirror when you’re not in a safe lane-changing zone.

The jury is out on a Cadillac option Alan sampled a while back — a rumble thing that shakes under your ass when you drift from your lane. He thought it was silly, but I pointed out that on my Lansing commutes, it’s not unusual for — I swear — half the passing cars to be piloted by someone who is staring at a phone. I’ve seen so many motorists drifting out of their lanes at 80 miles per hour that I’d be in favor of making the rumble-ass feature standard equipment on everything from zillion-dollar Cadillacs down to Kia subcompacts.

Actually, it would be nice to get an ass-rumble whenever we drift astray, don’t you think? I’ll let you think on that for a while.

So, bloggage?

“Mad Men” starts Sunday with some new evidence on how far we’ve fallen since the 1960s:

We see Don reading “The Inferno” from Dante while he and Megan lie on the beach in Hawaii. As the camera lingers on Megan’s bikini bottom, Jon Hamm’s voice over thoughtfully recites, “I went astray from the straight road (pause) and woke to find myself alone (pause) in a dark wood.”

When was the last time you saw anyone reading Dante on a beach? I ask you.

Happy Wednesday, all.

Late start today, and I apologize. A poor Sunday sleep makes Nance a wrung-out rag on Monday evening, but honestly, I can’t even plead that. I felt fine last night, but chose to power-watch some more “Homeland.” I now have three episodes to go in season 2. A perfect place to stick a bookmark in the story? Hardly.

Yesterday was actually a pretty good day, even for a Monday, which is typical. Though I’m sure it’s mainly coincidence, I have my best days when everyone else is having terrible ones, and yesterday I learned of two premature, tragic deaths in my extended social circle.

For those who’ve been here a while: My former News-Sentinel colleague Emma Downs lost her husband, who suffered a heart attack on Valentine’s Day and had been hospitalized ever since. Forty-two years old with a 7-year-old son. And Marcia K., who used to comment here for a while but doesn’t anymore, and who has suffered her own share of grief in the interim, got another when her nephew was one of those killed in the massive pileup on I-77 in Virginia over the weekend. One month from graduating Duke Law. This is, truly, a broken world.

But I had a good day and was rewarded with another week of vacation. So I’m taking it, because, as these examples abundantly illustrate, you never know.

That won’t be until June, however. In the meantime, here’s an open thread. I have to get back to work.

I had a sudden and unsettling change in my vision in the last week — a spot of blurriness, dead-center in my right eye — and after a few days of fretting, got in to see an ophthalmologist today. I told her I was concerned about macular degeneration.

“Oh, so you’ve been online?” she asked, with just a whisper of condescension, enough that I wondered if I should ask if she went to a college of osteopathic medicine because she couldn’t get into a real medical school. But I didn’t. I’m sure doctors deal with a lot of hypochondriacs, and I’m sure the web has enabled new frontiers of symptom-searching and rare disease obsessions. I’m sure it comes up a lot.

However. The flip side of a doom-fearing patient is one who is taking an interest in their own health. My friend Dr. Frank always said he’d rather have a patient with a sheaf of Reader’s Digest clippings, half of them crap, than the lump who sits there and says, “What kinda pills you gonna give me for my emphysema?”

So that was the afternoon’s irritation. That, and the dilated pupils.

It turns out I have a fluid deposit on the macula. (“So yes, it was something.” — my doctor.) Need to see another specialist. The treatment might be waiting it out, or surgery. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you posted. I already told Alan that if I’m struck blind, I intend to be one of those blind people who insists on touching everyone’s face. I will out-blind Stevie Wonder. But I doubt it will come to that.

How do you deal with doctors who get on your nerves?

And as always, I have to say: I’m grateful to have health insurance.

I don’t have much bloggage today. Some interesting data from the Wonkblog: Nine facts about marriage and childbirth in the U.S.

Beyond that, it’s just Wednesday night, and now, Thursday morning.

There’s very little of a bum mood that can’t be banished by a Monday-night screening of “Sunset Boulevard” on the RetroPlex channel. What a great movie. I can’t believe they made a stupid musical from it. Why try to improve on perfection? “Sunset Boulevard” had me as soon as Joe Gillis said he was going back to his $35 a week job behind the copy desk at the Dayton Evening Post.

It’s the pictures that got small, all right. William Holden — such glorious self-loathing.

So, Monday night and the week is off to a pretty good start. Kate got an A+ on an impromptu essay in her AP class, so it seemed to call for a celebration. Mexican food, a Diet Coke, the simple things. Alan’s still sick, but it won’t last forever. And Saturday’s forecast is for bright sunshine and 48 glorious degrees.

In the meantime, drink deep of some pretty good bloggage, although it will only depress us again:

A story you can sip or drink deeply from, one of those Planet Money/This American Life collaborations, looking at the thorny problem of disability. As in: How many Americans are suddenly so designated:

In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government.

The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined. Yet people relying on disability payments are often overlooked in discussions of the social safety net. People on federal disability do not work. Yet because they are not technically part of the labor force, they are not counted among the unemployed.

In other words, people on disability don’t show up in any of the places we usually look to see how the economy is doing. But the story of these programs — who goes on them, and why, and what happens after that — is, to a large extent, the story of the U.S. economy. It’s the story not only of an aging workforce, but also of a hidden, increasingly expensive safety net.

The story itself is a quick read, the link to the radio show a deeper dive.

But because a story that grim deserves a little palate-cleanser, how about this, via Bassett:

Some Tennessee legislators feared creeping Sharia, but sometimes a floor-level basin is just a mop sink. Not a foot bath.

The first step of the week is the hardest. Welcome, Tuesday.

I wish something had actually happened over the weekend that I could write about today. I wish I had been struck by a thought, learned a new skill, did something different or unusual. But no.

I did my weekend shopping. Here’s what I bought:

Underwear
Groceries
Gasoline
Spinach, asparagus, spring mix, eggs (I break out Eastern Market purchases separately from groceries, because I enjoy the shopping so much more). Also, bacon and fuckin’ sausage. Sausage in our house gets the obscene modifier due to a private joke that wouldn’t be funny to you.
Two movie tickets.

OK, there’s something — the movie tickets. Went with some friends to the Redford Theater, one of those restored movie houses with an in-house pipe organ. They show classic films, on film, and beg for your change at the concession stand so they can replace the carpeting. The show: “Easter Parade” with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, one of those featherlight MGM musicals that everyone remembers in a pastel blur until you see it again. And you remember it for a while, until it all goes pastel again. Which isn’t to say it’s not enjoyable; watching Fred Astaire dance is one of those great gifts Hollywood gave the world, and Judy’s singing likewise. The second bananas, Ann Miller and a very young, pre-Kennedy pimp Peter Lawford are less memorable, but Ann got some great costumes and Lawford was…well, he was young and handsome.

Something I noticed this time: Judy has a song just for us.

Irving Berlin wrote “Easter Parade,” which I didn’t know. That means two beloved songs pegged to Christian holidays came from a Jewish American. I love this country.

I don’t love this weather. I can’t believe I bought sunscreen a month ago. Pout, pout.

Part of my mental malaise is due to the physical one moving through the household, and while I haven’t fallen to it yet, it seems like only a matter of time. Last week, I sat across a lunch table from a colleague who sounded like death. I thought frantic hand washing and squirts of sanitizer saved me, but then Alan succumbed on Friday. I promptly moved my pillows to the guest room, but it may have been too late. And this is a bad one. It’ll likely strike as soon as the weather warms.

Although that won’t be for another week. We might nudge 50 by Friday, but likely not.

This is all I do these days: Bitch about boredom and the weather. Well, next week starts [community-theater English accent] Game of Throoones.{/community-theater English accent]. It will be very different from “Easter Parade,” that’s for sure.

Hope you all had a wonderful Palm Sunday. Let’s see what the week again brings.

Rain, cold, snow, sleet. More of all on the way. Open thread, while we wait for spring.

Sorry. I had an all-day meeting Monday and I learned to play Texas Hold’em. It made me miss five-card draw.