A Grand Rapids Saturday night. And why are we in Dutchistan? Because we have to pick up Kate at camp about 45 minutes northwest of here on Sunday, so what the hell. This is the second year in a row we’ve made homecoming eve a couple’s getaway in west Michigan, so I guess it’s a tradition now.

And yes, we’re at the Amway again. A million Rainbow Girls are checking in. As far as I can tell, they’re called Rainbow Girls because they favor Vera Bradley garment bags and duffels, which make a vivid color mashup on the luggage carts, along with the coolers in bright primary shades, because who can travel without a cooler? A few seem to be packing special stuffed animals as well. Rainbow Girls are the teen-girl version of Demolay, right? And Demolay is a Masonic thing? Whatever. All I know is, it’s 5 p.m., and some of them are loafing around the lobby in flip-flops and T-shirts, a few more in cocktail dresses and platform sandals, and a few more in floor-length gowns, which makes me wonder what the hell is on the agenda for tonight. But not enough to keep us hanging around, not when there’s a tapas place to be patronized.

I have to say, before I go on, the downtown is surprisingly oxygenated. Fort Wayne could learn a thing or two from this place. Clubs, bars, restaurants everywhere, lots of people out walking around. The tapas place was full. A few of the patrons were young women wearing tiaras and sashes. I thought they might be Rainbow alumane. A closer look revealed they were bachelorettes.

I don’t want to say this started with “Bridesmaids” because obviously it didn’t, but the movie seems to have breathed new life into the idea of going out with your besties the week before your wedding, eating tapas, getting shitfaced and otherwise bonding. If you can’t afford Vegas, Grand Rapids will do. For what it’s worth, these groups were well-behaved, but then, the sun hadn’t set yet. Back at the hotel, there were more — two more parties, one of which was uniformly dressed in outfits I disapprove of, in the sense that they defied the advice I offer to my daughter. Which is: “If you want to dress sexy, you have three choices — tight, short or low-cut. Choose one, two at the absolute most. All three and you cross the line into slutty.” (Actually, I think Michael Kors tells the contestants on “Project Runway” the same thing. Is the tangerine queen a mother at heart?) The woman waiting for the elevator with me had chosen all three, in a stretch-lace minidress that had the extra detail of being rendered in a eye-popping day-glo highway-hazard orange. It puzzled me until I remembered the electronic-music festival — it shows up under black lights at crummy nightclubs.

Well, a girl wants to be seen.

As it turned out, the crushing fatigue, and the effects of a half-bottle of pinot grigio, couldn’t keep me awake past 11, so who knows how these parties ended up? As it turned out, the cable channels were running “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight,” so what the hell, why not enjoy this giant HD hotel TV for a few minutes? Caught a bit of both. and all I can say is: What a mess. Heath Ledger was great, the rest incoherent, but I don’t go into these things with an open mind. And I only watched about 30 minutes.

Do I have any bloggage? Not much. I didn’t read the Sunday papers very closely, and I cannot stand to even consider the news from Aurora until we have more of it — I have seen this particular movie too many times to do more. One observation, though: I was watching the shaky cellphone video taken that night from the theater, marveling at a few things, including:

Why is this on TV? It shows nothing, is of poor quality, and mainly reveals that the person shooting didn’t have the sense to take cover when blood-soaked people began staggering out of a movie theater. If everyone’s going to be a journalist, they ought to know that many newsrooms have a closet with riot gear. For a reason.

Here’s another video, if you have 12 minutes: “Goat Years,” a short I saw at a film festival a few weeks back. A Detroit story about love, loss and goats. One goat, actually:

Happy Monday, all.

First things first. Let’s have a kiki:

Some of the language in that video is NSFW, but hey, it’s the Scissor Sisters. I need to get in a gay frame of mind, because “Project Runway” is starting, and I’m giving it a try this season. I got a little pissed when the girl with the Skrillex hair won, she and her series of flowy, drapey, dress-like outfits. They were very wearable, if you were a six-foot-tall skeleton with no tits whatsoever.

I’ll tell you, the first flowy-drapey thing that wins, I’m totally outta there. Although I can see the crowd includes an insane Japanese guy with an afro, so I have high hopes.

[Long pause.]

And with that, I must confess: I fell asleep on the couch in the second half hour of “Project Runway,” it’s now Friday morning, and I just learned that your generic crazed American madman in Aurora, Colo., killed 14 people at a midnight showing of the new Batman movie.

I thought we were done with that in this country. Guess not.

Now CNN is reporting the casualties include children as young as 6. Because that’s where you take a 6-year-old these days — to a midnight screening of a dark, violent comic-book movie. Which is not to say any parent shares the blame for this. Only, as they say on the internet, smh.

(Shaking my head, for you geezers.)

Watching CNN, the choppers are circling what looks like an apartment building. Presumably, that’s the killer’s house. It looks like the kind of place you see in every city in the land. If I were looking to hide in plain sight, I’d move into one of those — maybe a dozen units, every one the same, window air conditioners, neighbors only known as a collection of thumps and noises on the other side of a wall. Maybe that’s what he was after.

Not much bloggage now, but maybe one fitting piece — Alex Pareene on “The Newsroom,” Aaron Sorkin’s hugely disappointing HBO show. I’ve given it four chances, but I have to agree with Pareene:

Even his sparkling banter is one-note. His characters always say exactly, precisely what they mean, at all times. There’s no subtext, no irony, nothing ever left unspoken in his dialogue. His characters don’t even get to be sarcastic without someone asking them if they’re being sarcastic. Everyone alternates between speechifying, quipping and dumbly setting up other people’s quips. It’s exhausting.

I’m imagining how the crew from “The Newsroom” would cover this tragedy. Probably with much rushing around, and a dramatic moment where someone has to decide whether there’s a 15th victim, based on sketchy reports. Then the plucky intern would slam down the phone and say, “I just talked to the anesthesiologist! She’s out of surgery, and she’s alive!” That actually happened in the last episode, which dealt with the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. I actually guffawed. Because, as a journalist who’s tried to contact many doctors in the course of my work, I can tell you with absolute confidence that you don’t just ring up the anesthesiologist after trauma surgery. Unless, of course, the anesthesiologist is the caller’s college roommate’s father, and she just happens to have the number of his cell phone, and he answers it, and he decides talking to the media is a great idea. (And yes, that connection has been used a time or two so far, in only four episodes. What a well-connected group of journalists.)

The Today show just went to a commercial. I guess what that means is, it’s not that important a story.

Have a good weekend, all.

Oh, and for those who watched: Was “Project Runway” any good?

The stifling heat wave hasn’t been kind to anyone, but the impossible outdoor exercise conditions have sent me back to the pool, so there’s that. Lately I’ve been rising around 6, biking to my city park, which opens for lap swimming at 6:30, doing a half-hour of back-and-forth and then riding home. It all takes a little over an hour, and when I pull into the garage around 7:45 a.m., I have the pleasure of knowing I’m done for the day. It makes sitting in a chair for the next six to eight hours more tolerable.

Today was even better. The pool was set up with 50-yard lanes, a rare treat apparently done for the benefit of the swim team, which comes in later in the morning. You have to be a regular lap swimmer to appreciate a 50-yard pool — it’s the distance where you can really establish a rhythm, stretch out and relax and not have to always be thinking of the wall coming up ahead. Fifty-yard lengths make you feel like an Olympian, even if you’re just plowing along with your usual bad form, lumpy old you.

When I got out, I overheard the lifeguard while I was drying off, talking on his phone. “A body in the river?” he said. “Huh.”

“Huh” is the new “far out.” I miss “far out.”

I forgot about it until my lunchtime news fly-by, and whaddaya know: Two bodies — in pieces — were pulled from the Detroit River this morning, along with a circular saw. The man who called it in had this to say:

“It was not a pleasant way to start the day.”

Thank you, alert citizen! What’s more, this wasn’t even the biggest news of the day. Two dismembered corpses were trumped by a major break in a decades-old series of child murders, the heat wave and a middling-to-serious scandal in the state legislature. I tell you, it’s like living in south Florida in the ’80s.

But as miserable as this heat has been, I’m enjoying summer. Last night’s dinner: Shrimp tossed in a peppery-butter sauce with cilantro, corn on the cob, the last of the weekend’s blueberry pie. Not bad, even if it was a day when I only went outside twice, and then not for long.

So, bloggage?

If you didn’t catch Jon Stewart’s return from vacation this week, you missed a particularly good one.

I can’t stand Spike Lee, but this is a pretty good interview with him.

Are women worse at parking than men? No. Ask my husband.

Good lord, I’m beat. Have a good Wednesday, all.

So, let’s try this again:

In our time together, Alan and I have stayed in a few dumps. At least until Kate was born, we preferred a less restrictive type of vacation, unbound by too many plans. We had a destination, but getting there was part of the fun, and we never knew where, exactly, we’d be stopping.

In those pre-cell phone, pre-internet days, our method was to find a quickie-mart on the outskirts of town, check the Yellow Pages for hotels/motels, and call from a pay phone until we found a vacancy. Ninety percent of the time, everything was fine; I still remember the night we spent in Rochester, Minn. — with many, many lodging options, thanks to the Mayo Clinic — as the one and only time I’ve been convinced a ghost was in the room with us. I woke up, heard footsteps on the scrunchy carpet, was able to see the whole room clearly with my night-dilated pupils, had no fear whatsoever, thought hmmm, I guess someone died in the clinic with unfinished business in this hotel, went back to sleep.

Maybe it was a dream. DON’T THINK SO.

The worst was in some Wyoming town — Cody, maybe — where we were delayed getting into Yellowstone. It was raining in Cody, snowing at the east entrance to the park, and all we had to do was kick around this ersatz wild-west town and wait for it to stop. The first night, I found the Yellow Pages ad: For all your tropical fish and lodging needs, it read. Ha! Hipster adventure dead ahead! We arrived at a weird, rambling house, full of fish as advertised, but more of a bed-and-no-breakfast than a hotel. Our room was in what had been the dining room. The ceiling over the bed bulged with water stains. Every time the toilet in the room above flushed, I heard dripping noises. I slept fitfully as the guest above drained his or her bladder repeatedly, and I waited for the ceiling to collapse and dump a load of human shit on our heads.

We found a far better place the next night. Went to the rodeo.

Another memorable place was in Iron Mountain, Mich., where we stopped on our way home from Isle Royale. “In-room movies,” the sign outside advertised. I figured this meant HBO. It did not. It meant that if you wanted to watch a movie, you went to the desk and were given a VCR and allowed to choose from a cardboard box of tapes. Actually, you could choose from two boxes — the second one held the porn. No judging! We didn’t watch any movies, but admired the carved bear out by the road.

This trip, Alan made a reservation at what looked like a charming place on the Muskegon River, near Newaygo. The plan was to drop Kate off at camp, towing the drift boat, then cut east to the big river and float it for a couple of days. Things were going just fine when we arrived; there was a big gazebo in the back, overlooking the river, with a burbling water feature full of frogs. I settled in with “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” and the time passed. Some more time passed. Where was the clerk? She was supposed to be a few minutes late, but… Alan checked the note on which he’d scribbled the details. He’d made the reservation for next week, not this. Oops. Well, we know how to handle this, although now we do it without the Yellow Pages.

We ended up at another riverfront place, a kozy-kabins deal right out of “Lolita.” The choices were: Big smelly room, smaller smelly room, “new” smelly room. I chose small-smelly when it became clear there were no queen-size mattresses in the place, no matter how big the room was. We checked in — cash only — and the owner told Alan it would be $5 extra for the TV. No, I don’t know why; probably something to do with the dish.

“Are you sure? Don’t come asking me after 8 o’clock,” she said.

Finally, we got into the room, where I washed my hands and discovered? No towels. Back to the office.

“I don’t normally provide those,” she said. But she found some. They were clean, something I was absurdly grateful for.

We headed out, launched the boat, and found it was a lovely day for a float, if only there had been more water in the river. We had to drag over about a dozen gravel bars, but otherwise, it was Wild Kingdom — a dozen great blue herons, even more kingfishers, a mink or two cavorting streamside and the coup de grace of two bald eagles, although the second one might have been the first one, circling around for another fly-by. That picture yesterday was a deep, slow stretch. Lotsa cliff swallows in that sand bank.

Back to the dump, and guess what we discovered? No soap, either. Well, it’s always fun to visit a Walgreen’s in a strange place. You really get a feel for a town that the tourist places don’t give you.

Day two we walked around Pentwater and Ludington, just to see what the sunset side was like. (Answer: Hot. Sunny.) And then home. Just a couple of days, but it felt like longer. In a good way, honest, although we’re not making that mistake with the hotels again.

So, some bloggage?

If you read only one more Paterno story, read this one from the New York Times.

In Coozledad’s world, “In the Heat of the Night” is a documentary.

And if you read nothing more about Mitt Romney’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Weekend, make it this. Funny.

Finally, the lifeguard’s dilemma as a parable of outsourcing.

I’m off to bed.

I just wrote a 1,500-word post about our mini-vacation, hitting the high points and closing with some good bloggage.

WordPress ate 75 percent of it. I now hate WordPress.

So here’s the gist: We’re back, we had a good time. But I’m not rewriting that goddamn post.

Mother fracker.

Here’s a picture:

God, I hate WordPress.

The morning of the health-care decision at the Supreme Court, before the decision was handed down, I tuned in to the local right-wing AM talk station, figuring it might be amusing to hear the pack tuning up. Alas, the host was beating, with no particular enthusiasm, a drum that anyone could tell his heart wasn’t into — the “stoning” of a Christian group whose only crime was to show up at an Arab-American heritage festival in Dearborn and start yelling REPENT at the assembled Muslims, punctuated by waving a pig head around.

I have to admit, I didn’t have the patience to watch the whole video, but I did drag the playhead to the 9-minute mark, when the stoning allegedly starts. “Stones, rocks and debris,” is what the subtitles say. It’s impossible to tell on the shakycam video, but it mostly looked like water bottles to me. When you think about it, it’s probably easier to find those lying around at a street festival in an urban environment than it would be to find stones, even stones comma rocks. But whatever. I didn’t hear anyone screaming ahhh my eye!!!, but I did hear a lot of ouch! hey! that hurt! which would seem to indicate more of a water-bottle assault than a truly dangerous, rock-based one.

Which isn’t, of course, justification for the violence at all. But when you show up at an ethnic festival loaded for bear — this far shorter video gives you more of a sense of things — the least you can do is not whine when the bear bites you.

The Arab-American News has a pretty comprehensive story on this. I know it’s going around the right-wing blogs, so just in case you’re looking for the rest of the story, y’know?

And now, we haz a sad: Ruby left us behind this weekend. After three years of absolutely uneventful good health, she didn’t come out of her cage Thursday for her usual morning hop-around. I left the door open, and when noon came and went with no appearance, I dragged her out for some amateur veterinary care. There was a little bit of blood around her bottom, nothing alarming, but I took her to the professionals, who gave her antibiotics and a rather vigorous manual exam, but in the end, with rabbits, it’s mostly a matter of shrugging and conjecture. No fly strike (thank GOD), maybe a vaginal infection (yes, go ahead and laugh), maybe a hairball, maybe…? Who knows? You can’t exactly do exploratory surgery on a rabbit. I gave her the antibiotics on schedule and other recommended care, but she turned the corner downhill fast. I missed a followup call from the vet on Saturday, and that might have made a difference, but probably not. We gave her fluids when we could get her to swallow them, petted her a lot, told her she was a good bunny. She died Sunday morning in a pool of sunlight, looking out at the back yard.

I blamed myself for missing the vet’s call, and did my penance by digging the grave myself. I think the whole exercise of grave-digging is for us to remember the deceased, even a three-pound pet rabbit. Ruby lived in our kitchen, and we had many conversations while I made dinner, and I’m not ashamed to tell you I played her part in a high, squeaky voice:

Give me some of that lettuce. Now. I’m terribly, terribly hungry.

Sure, Ruby. Would you like a little of this bacon, too?

I’m a strict vegan, and I wish you’d stop bringing that stuff into our house. Don’t my beliefs count for anything around here?

Not nearly as funny as Animals Talking in All Caps, but we had our moments.

She liked dried cherries and bananas. She was simultaneously afraid of everything and unafraid of us stinky primates 50 times her size — we were rabbit-punched many times. She enriched our lives with her beauty and grace, and sometimes watched “Cops” with us from her perch on the back of the couch.

Wherever she is now, I hope to meet her again someday.

A hot weekend, capping a hot week, and looking forward to a hot week ahead, perhaps punctuated by? Storms. We missed the Friday-afternoon blow that currently has tens of thousands in Fort Wayne without power, and continued on to the eastern seaboard and has hundreds of thousands without power, so I guess that means that if we make it through the holiday and through to the weekend with electricity, we will be very lucky people indeed.

My editor is headed for San Francisco on vacation this week. “Where it’s 60 degrees,” he’s said, more than once. This weather doesn’t agree with him. Nor with anyone else.

But hey! Independence Day is nearly upon us. I have a big box of blueberries from the market, so if I can get a big box of raspberries somewhere on Monday or Tuesday, I can make one of those flag cakes you see on the cover of Good Housekeeping.

I had a pleasant weekend, due in part to the heat. When it’s too hot to do anything, there’s not much to do but ride your bike to the park, find a lounge under one of the big umbrellas, and chill with an old Elmore Leonard paperback. (Can’t take the iPad to the pool, yo.) I swam for a while, then read until it got out of hand, heatwise, even under the umbrella. It was actually quite relaxing, except for the ride home. All that blazing-hot asphalt really takes it out of you.

Meanwhile, I got you some bloggage.

I hope you can read this, a great WSJ piece on “The Girl From Ipanema,” on the 50th anniversary of the song’s release. It includes a photo of the actual GfI, but not the best fact I learned about the song along the way, that the English lyrics take considerable liberties with the original Portuguese. There’s a passage in the latter that describes her bundas, her bottom: More than a poem, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

One of my colleagues at Bridge, Rick Haglund, takes apart the president’s “private sector is doing fine,” comment, for which he has received such a raft of it:

While polls show Americans are dissatisfied with the economy, the president had a point. Corporate profit margins are at record levels. In Michigan, the automakers are churning out billions of dollars in earnings.

The private sector has created 4.3 million jobs in the past 27 months. But the United States is still down nearly 5 million jobs since the Great Recession started in December 2007.

But it’s not just the number of jobs that determines a healthy economy. It’s also about income growth, and most Americans haven’t seen much for years.

CNN has a disturbing story suggesting the depth of the conspiracy in the Penn State case. St. Joe was in the thick of it, if it’s to be believed. Quel surprise.

And now the week begins. Stay cool.

I know many of you probably don’t feel the tragedy of Saturday morning’s post. Something like 80 percent of Michigan’s tree-fruit crop was KO’d by the two weeks of summer we had in March, and when it means you’re deprived of cherries and peaches a few months later, well, that hurts.

Nevertheless, I made m’self a pie. And none other than Hank Stuever and his partner Michael were here to help us eat it. What a weekend. It was well-spent.

Hank and Michael are en route up north, and wanted to see the infamous city along the way, so we entertained them, cobbling together a two-day schedule that included a sail, dinner, a drive out Woodward and through some of the worst blight in the city (Robinwood Street), then into Palmer Woods, across Eight Mile and all the way up to Cranbrook, where we beheld where the Demon Barber of Bloomfield Hills performed his most famous haircut.

And then, because it’s required of all out-of-town visitors, we went to Slow’s. The meal was, conservatively, two million calories. I may not eat again for a week.

The weekend was capped by fireworks. So you could say it was a good one.

And because I spent so much time away from the keys, I don’t have a great deal of bloggage. This is sort of grimly amusing: Home prices in the city of Detroit are now below $10,000. So what can you get at what price? Some jaw-dropping bargains.

One weekend with you: Republicanpalooza in Utah over the weekend.

Do you know how rare a true tie is in track and field? Too close to call.

The week awaits. Summer in the city.

I think it’s obvious that five years of working until 1 a.m., rising at 6 a.m., and stumbling through the day like a zombie? Has ruined my sleep hygiene. Thursday morning my eyes popped open at 4:30 a.m. Weren’t going to close, either. So I grabbed the iPad, read the entire internet, and when I was no closer to sleep than I’d been before and it was 6 a.m., said screw it and headed out into the young day. Rode the bike to the park, swam laps for 30 minutes and rode home, for an I’m Better Than You score of, what? You tell me. If only I weren’t 20 pounds overweight and had the knees of a octogenarian — I could have made it a triathlon morning.

And now it’s 9:30 p.m., and if I don’t fall asleep in the next 20 minutes, I’ll call this day a success.

And the thing is? It seemed I had something more interesting to say, but after a day spent online and on the phone, all I clipped was this link:

If you use the Google — and we all do — you’re probably doing it wrong. Here’s how to do it better.

I think I’m going to have to move some things around, or I’ll never recover this blog’s mojo. I come to it at the very time of day when I’m feeling most tapped out. And yet somehow, something gets published, most days.

Even though, many days, things must be carried along by a photo of a raccoon with its head caught in a sewer grate.

How can such grimy, icky animals be so damn cute?

Something serious, but very much worth the read: Why sexual assault victims do the crazy, contradictory, counterintuitive things they frequently do.

And with that? Zzzzzz.

Day one of a threatened three-day heat wave is behind us. Huzzah, because it was a little like being an ant under a magnifying glass. The older I get, the more interesting I find the weather, and judging from the Weather Channel demographics, it’s a thing; we all know old people can watch the radar all day. Yesterday, a big bruise of a storm marched across the Mitten, right down I-96. It was already pretty hot, but the storm brought a little relief, but not for long; it had a hot comet’s tail behind it. Driving home from Lansing Monday, the storm having cleared the east coast of the state (but not for long), I heard the temperatures — Detroit 76, Lansing 80, Holland, over there in West Dutchistan, 90.

Ninety-five or so today, so I got my workout in early, riding for an hour at 5:30 a.m. The things you see at that hour: Newspaper delivery people, insomniacs, impossibly early risers, lots of bunnies. It didn’t seem very hot until I got home, when, robbed of the cooling breeze, my head went off like a sprinkler.

Eh, all I had to do is take out the trash — it’s not like I needed opera gloves.

So, let’s go to the bloggage, because I’m t’ard:

I found even the trailer excruciating. Imagine what it was like to actually watch, and review, “That’s My Boy.” Eric Zorn found out — about the reviewing, anyway:

Eric D. Snider, Film.com: I exited the theater …. my spirit broken, my optimism shattered, my soul reborn under a thick, cynical shell. (It’s a) putrid comedy (featuring many examples of its) rancid screenplay’s festering laziness….Somehow stretched to an excruciating 116 minutes in length, the film offers seven or eight genuinely clever lines, but they are drowned out by the braying, pointless stupidity that surrounds them.

More at the link. Funny.

But when it comes to excruciating entertainment, can you really beat “Stars Earn Stripes?” It features Todd Palin. Gotta see the picture at the link; it’s like an asshole Avengers.

Man, I’m whipped. Let’s get through Hump Day, and cruise on into the back half of things.