Michigan’s whack driver-education system does seem to have some good aspects. We’ve embarked on a six-month period called the “level 1 license,” which means Kate can only drive with one of us in the car with her. It’s going to take at least that long before I’m satisfied she’s ready. Although I had my first experience with her yesterday, and so far? So good. Clutches are difficult.

We started in a parking lot, then transitioned to some straight neighborhood streets in Detroit, followed Mack all the way to the Eastern Market, skated through downtown’s fringe, lapped Belle Isle and came home on Jefferson through a driving thunderstorm. Hit one curb, stalled about 50 times, but got through it intact. The next time will go better. Experience is all.

Now would be the time to trade for an automatic, but some part of me simply refuses. I’m a stick-shift girl, and I want my progeny to be, too. #pointlessvanities

Otherwise, it was a pleasant Father’s Day weekend. I bought a beautiful fish at the market, so pretty I thought it would speak to me from its bed of ice. Yellow-tail snapper, come to mama. It was more of a challenge than I would have liked — should have had the guy clean it all the way, rather than just de-gutting it — but it tasted nice, especially with a citrus beurre blanc and some rice and peas on the side. Must put more fish in the ol’ diet, and if they’re this good, it’ll be a pleasure.

And if my life is as boring as this, why am I bothering keeping this stupid blog?

Probably so we can all discuss the news of the day, like the First Lady’s links to a white family in the south, via the peculiar institution. Very interesting story, shedding light on the shared ancestors of two families of different races, in a way that suggests the real antebellum south, not the “Gone With the Wind” variety:

(The slave) Melvinia was a teenager, perhaps around 15, when she gave birth to her biracial son. Charles was about 20.

Such forbidden liaisons across the racial divide inevitably bring to mind the story of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Mrs. Obama’s ancestors, however, lived in a world far removed from the elegance of Jefferson’s Monticello, his 5,000-acre mountain estate with 200 slaves. They were much more typical of the ordinary people who became entangled in America’s entrenched system of servitude.

In Clayton County, Ga., where the Shields family lived, only about a third of the heads of household owned human property, and masters typically labored alongside their slaves. Charles was a man of modest means — he would ultimately become a teacher — whose parents were only a generation or so removed from illiteracy.

Melvinia was not a privileged house slave like Sally. She was illiterate and no stranger to laboring in the fields. She had more biracial children after the Civil War, giving some of the white Shieldses hope that her relationship with Charles was consensual.

What a crazy country.

Or we could talk about Obama’s immigration move last week, which I think was brilliant, but you may disagree.

Or we could talk about Rodney King, dead at 47, after what sounds like a not-very-happy life.

Or we could just acknowledge: With Monday, another week begins. Hope yours is great.

I think I’ve mentioned here before that one of my college classmates was Peter King, now a bigfoot sportswriter at Sports Illustrated. Another was Jay Mariotti, this guy. You should read that link; apparently life has taken a turn for the former Chicago Sun-Times scribe, who quit the paper in a huff after becoming convinced the web was the future.

Things have gone downhill from there, as the Gawker post points out. It’s so hard to reconcile this image of Jay with the guy I knew in 1978, whom I recall as quiet and hard-working. Well, things change.

Another classmate, one who yearned to be a famous sportswriter with every fiber of his being, was this guy. He wanted it so bad he sued the Plain Dealer for racial discrimination, although it never went anywhere. Now I see he’s landed on his feet, having published a book about cereal:

Even the most miniscule detail about breakfast cereal impacts Gitlin and his passion for pouring bowls.

About 20 years ago, he said he sat down for a spoonful of Alpha Bits and, much to his horror, Post had removed the sweetening.

“I was stupefied,” he said. “I went in my room and cried. Very soon after that they took Alpha Bits off the market, and when it returned it was pre-sweetened again. Post understood the error of their ways.”

That story’s from the Plain Dealer. Good to see they don’t hold a grudge.

What a long, tiring day it was. Spent most of it at a conference in Lansing. I still have to write about it, so I guess I shouldn’t say too much, other than this: The lunch was very good, the lunch entertainment even more so — a rapping organic gardener. No, I am not kidding. Did you know farmin’ ain’t easy? Did you know he gots to have his kohlrabi, spinach and chard, and the rest of the rhyme probably included the word hard? It so happened I’d just listened to an interview with Ice-T on NPR on the way in; he has a documentary film about the birth of rap and hip-hop he’s promoting. I wonder what rhyme Ice-T could do for kohlrabi. The rappin’ gardener:

And then I get home and discover the real news in Lansing yesterday was in the state legislature, which silenced a female representative for a day after she said the word “vagina” on the floor, and no, I’m not kidding about that, either. I encourage you to watch the video and tell me if you think she was out of line. My only complaint is a technicality; the male legislators pushing this bill don’t want to be in her vagina, they want to be in her uterus, but as we’ve discussed here before — we’ve discussed everything, haven’t we? — a lot of people like to throw the word vagina around, and many of them do so incorrectly. As L.A. Mary once said, “We’re really talking about the vulva, aren’t we?” If Lisa Brown had said that, however, I’m sure the entire House of Representatives would have burst into flames.

The lege isn’t exactly covering itself with glory in recent days.

But while we’re talking about ladyparts, I must say, I’ve grown to like “Girls,” after its somewhat rocky start, and I think this Onion AV Club piece gets the show (along with “Enlightened”) exactly right. If nothing else, I admire Lena Dunham’s willingness to bare her highly imperfect body week after week after week, knowing the sort of shit that’s talked about her on the internet:

The world of entertainment still, all too often, values women only as objects of beauty to be placed on screen and ogled. I have no problem looking at a beautiful woman, but the world is full of other women who have profound, intelligent, often hilarious things to say, and Dunham is very quietly making a space for those voices on TV, in a way that’s revolutionary both in terms of the show’s gender politics and in terms of its presentation.

Or look at it this way: If this show was called Guys, and its showrunner/protagonist was in every other way similar to Dunham/Hannah—a dorky, slightly overweight guy who bumbled his way through Brooklyn, trying to find his purpose and working his way through a calamitous love life—would any of these criticisms have popped up? Would the people being uncharitable toward Girls have been uncharitable toward that series?

Lena Dunham’s body is no worse than that of Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jason Segal or any number of young male protagonists we’re expected to believe are sexually successful with women who look like Elizabeth Banks and Mila Kunis. And her love interest on “Girls” is actually in her league, in many ways. So fuck all that.

The decline and expensive fall of the Michigan film tax incentives, by moi, complete with sidebar, also by moi.

But that’s no note to leave on. So let it be this: Great weekends to all!

I can see this Sandusky trial is going to be…a trial. I think I’m going to have to read the weekly summaries, because I can’t take too much more of this daily stuff. Especially stuff like this:

“Sandusky was standing right up against the back of the young boy with his arms wrapped around (the boy’s) midsection in the closest proximity I think you can be,” McQueary said. “I was extremely alarmed, flustered and shocked.”

At one point, McQueary said, he returned to his locker and slammed the locker door “in an attempt to say someone’s here, ‘break it up.'”

I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again: None of us knows how we would react in such a situation. But my god, I’m growing tired of all the harrumphing and locker-slamming and eye-averting that went on in this case. I think, every time, of the women I know, the mothers. I could tick off a dozen 110-pounders who, if they saw such a thing, would have rushed in like those little birds you see in the spring driving crows away from their nests. They would have Heisman’d that old perv and taken the boy out under their fierce little wings, and if anyone tried to stop them, well, then you’d see the fingernails.

But again, we don’t know what we’d do. We only hope we’d do better.

For Detroiters and visitors: The owner/chef at Supino’s Pizza gives you a few options for local dining, in GQ. Did I mention Hank Stuever is coming to visit in a couple of weeks? Hank, what looks good to you?

I hope I’m recovered by then. Went to the doctor today, for the second time in a week. I told her my head felt like I was wearing a diving bell at all times, that Alan was complaining about how loud I was setting the TV volume, that I drove an unknown number of miles yesterday with my turn signal on, because I couldn’t hear the thing clicking at me.

“Ear infections take their time to resolve,” she said.

“I don’t say this often, seriously,” I replied. “But I want a more powerful antibiotic. Not the carpet bomb. Just something with a little higher octane.”

So, a Z-pack. Fingers crossed.

And so, bloggage:

Worst songs of all time: Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey.” Worse than “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife?” Worse than “Watchin’ Scotty Grow?” Yeah, I think so.

Farewell from inside the diving bell.

Ninety degrees both days of the weekend. It might as well be 12 below, but I forced myself out in it just the same. As my recovery from Inflated Head Syndrome seems to have stalled — yes, mom, still taking the antibiotic, and hoping for a miracle — I thought a slow bike ride might be in order. Very strange, riding a bicycle with one’s head hovering about 10 feet above the action, but there you are. It felt like a balloon on a very long string. And so, when I turned, the bike would go a few feet before YANK the string would correct the course of the balloon, and the balloon would bob along until YANK the next turn and is it really this hot? Because if 2012 is going to be another summer of 2011, it will be a long one.

BOB.YANK.

But I got my banking done. So there’s that.

Also saw “Prometheus” with the fam, in 3D ‘n’ ev’rythang. It was a sprawling, beautiful hunk o’ disappointment. Very nice to look at, with a story that made no sense. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here, because I’m only going with the first-act material: Cave paintings from around the ancient world all seem to suggest an alien visitation, so off our brave explorers go in their entertaining mix of ethnicities and attitudes in the year 2093, to find this extraterrestrial culture. They’re aided by a robot played by Michael Fassbender, who was the greatest thing about the movie, because, duh, Michael Fassbender.

This is tied to the original “Alien,” of course, and if you’re wondering where you saw these scenes before, of an entertainingly mixed crew waking from cryo-sleep and eating a grumpy breakfast together, well, that’s where. It just seemed so much…better the first time around. “Alien” was the first movie that made me consider what a deep-space work vessel would look like, and what sort of crew such a space truck might have. Of course, “Alien” is 30 years old now, and millions of young moviegoers haven’t seen it.

And I don’t care what anyone says. The big gross-out scene in “Prometheus” isn’t fit to touch the hem of John Hurt’s garment in the original chest-burster scene from “Alien.” I think they actually had to peel me off the ceiling of the theater after that one.

That, in the end, might be the biggest single flaw with “Prometheus” — everything’s an homage, a callback, and update of and to something that was truly original. Which made it disappointing.

(Was “Alien” really original? Film critics always point out it’s not a sci-fi movie, it’s a haunted-house movie. Granted. But it was an original sci-fi/haunted-house mashup, at least.)

So, bloggage? Sure:

Some of you may have noticed Cooze has been a bit testy of late. He has an excuse — Balto’s been missing. But the story has a happy ending, told as only he can. (Why does Verlyn Klinkenborg bore the shit out of us in the pages of the New York Times with his dispatches from yonder, while Cooze has only a blog? I ASK YOU.)

Here’s something very strange — a near-novella-length post by a gay Mormon, coming out of the closet on the occasion of his 10-year wedding anniversary, and yes, he’s married to a woman. He calls himself a unicorn. I refer to one of Nance’s Truths, i.e., there is no mystery in life deeper and more inexplicable than the human heart. I’m sure this will be jumped on by the anti-gay marriage crowd. I don’t really care what they do. I hope his wife is content, and she certainly states that she is, multiple times. (The violent smiles in the photos have an air of creepiness to them, I have to say.) Just something to read.

And so the week begins. Fingers crossed for full health by its end.

Fresh open thread for Friday. I finally got to the doctor today, to learn I have? An ear infection. Like a little kid, yes. I even got the little-kid medicine, amoxicillin. But only five hours after swallowing the first dose, the pain is markedly reduced on one side of my head and I hope will be entirely gone on both by tomorrow.

Antibiotics. I avoid them at much as possible, but when you need them, they are miraculous things.

So I spent the evening doing memo-writing instead of blogging. You take what you like from the internet and discuss it at will, eh? I’m hoping I’ll be back at 100 percent by Monday.

I wasn’t going to write about the new restrictions on extra-large sugary soft drink sales in New York City, and then MMJeff brought it up elsewhere, and so let’s thrash, shall we?

I don’t have strong feelings on it one way or another. The subject of obesity comes up from time to time here, and we’ve run through the usual reasons. The more I think about it, the more I look at photos from my youth and marvel at how few people, even among my parents’ friends, were seriously overweight — well, I don’t have any answers, just a few hunches. And I think portion size is a big part of it.

I think portion size is one of those insidious things. It creeps up a little at a time. We’re told to fill our plates, and we do — even though the plate is two inches bigger than the ones we grew up eating from. It’s bigger because kitchens are bigger, and kitchen tables are bigger, and everything is bigger because otherwise, what will motivate you to buy a new set of dishes? You need that stuff.

Anyway, as I’ve probably stated here a million times, I grew up drinking those little 6.5-ounce Cokes. Sometimes my mom would buy the 12-ounce six-packs, or the 16-ounce Pepsi six-packs. Returnable bottles. We had little plastic caps to reseal them. You never drank a whole bottle by yourself. A six-pack kept four of us happy for a week.

New York City is a small place, and even the millions who live there comprise only a fraction of the country’s population. But it’s the Temple Mount of our culture — almost everything starts there. I think Mayor Bloomberg knows this. I don’t think he’s doing this with any serious policy effect in mind; I think he’s just trying to start a conversation.

In 1979, I started my first newspaper job. I was in an seven-person department, and four of us smoked. A guy I walked by several times a day had an ashtray the size of a hubcap on his desk, and he filled that sucker up, every day. Alan and I went to New York 22 years later, when the city was the largest one in the country with a city-wide smoking ban. We saw the Mingus Big Band in a low-ceilinged, basement club, and left two hours later remarking on how nice it was to not be reeking of cigarettes. Michigan now bans smoking in nearly all public places. Who thinks this is a crazy intrusion of the nanny state now?

In my lifetime, we’ve vanquished cigarettes, or at least put them in full retreat. Bad food may be the next front in the war, and should be, given how disproportionately it effects affects the poor, the young and the powerless.

Does banning gigantic sody-pops look like a solution? No. But it’s a conversation-starter. I’m willing to have it.

Good lord, this plague is persistent. Every time I think I’m out of it? IT PULLS ME BACK IN. So I have no bloggage today. Do you?

I went to bed last night at 6:30 p.m. and stayed there for 12.5 hours. Open thread today. But before the anniversary disappears in the rear-view mirror, a musical tribute to Ten Cent Beer Night. For those of you who can’t watch video, a sober narrative.

Calling the doc today. I’m beginning to think I need stronger drugs.

Sometime early in the first cocktail hour — one of seemingly millions of cocktail opportunities last week — a gentleman of Anishinabe Indian heritage directed me to the far side of the shrimp station, where a vodka company had set up one of those ridiculous exercises in branding. You gotta see this, he said.

Three attractive servers stood behind a bar made entirely of perfectly clear ice, decorated with flowers and flanked by two large frozen vertical S’s. You gave your martini order to one, who shook it up and handed it to one of the flankers, who gave you a frosted glass, then climbed a stepstool and motioned for you to hold your glass under a spout at the bottom of the S. She then poured your drink into a funnel frozen into the ice, and it snaked through a tube and exited at the bottom, into your glass. Quite cold.

“That’s very clever,” I said. My new pal said he thought so, too. We talked some more and I said I didn’t want to keep him from networking and I’d see him around. I stepped out onto the 800-foot-long porch of the Grand Hotel to sip my cranberry Grey Goose martini, and thought about how this very island belonged to the Anishinabe, and not all that long ago. Then the world revolved around the sun a couple hundred times, and here we were, May 29, 2012, and I was just served a French vodka martini in the largest summer hotel in the world in the company of one of those folks, and he works for a high-end grocery store and I work for a think tank.

What a weird world it is.

I’ll have more to say about the conference; I’m still sorting it out in my head and on my desk. It was a pretty lavish affair and I met a lot of people and heard a lot. On the final day I was felled by a virus of undetermined lineage. I spent Friday and Saturday writhing in misery back home in my guest room, but seem to be on the mend now. I am at least cheery enough to have gotten a mighty chuckle out of the fact I spent most of the past week hearing that DETROIT IS BACK, BABY and today the city’s Grand Prix came thisclose to being called on account of a pothole.

In the meantime, my only bit of bloggage is this: What am I bid for this lovely portrait of Andrew Breitbart as a knight?

Have a great week.

Watching the National Geographic Geography Bee, hosted by Alex Trebek. Of the 10 finalists, only one is a white male and one is female; all the rest are Americans of Asian (or south Asian) descent. The first ones eliminated were? The white boy and the girl (who is Indian). Hello, future masters! Enjoy this crazy country.

This is ridiculously hard. I’m getting about one question in eight. I really need to brush up on my Asian peninsulas.

It’s killer when they get eliminated, too. I imagine a Tiger Mom screeching backstage about how they’re going to get into Harvard NOW, eh, Mr. Smart Guy?

And with that, I will dispense with the ethnic stereotypes.

The four finalists left were asked the capital of Uzbekistan. Or, as we know it, Uz-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.

The answer is Tashkent.

I’m already feeling weekend-y; are you? What I mean by that is, I’m just thinking about reading, doing a little biking, hoping the air-conditioning doesn’t break down and stopping in at Movement, aka the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, for a little dubstep.

Or, as my boss says: It’s potato-salad season! And I’ll be making some.

A note about next week: Light posting, maybe non-existent posting, maybe some pix. I’ll be on Mackinac Island, attending the Detroit Regional Chamber’s annual public-policy conference. It’s Tuesday through Thursday, so with travel and all the rest of it thrown in, I’ll be lucky to crank out a few shots of the Grant Hotel and blue coastlines. But you never know.

Until then, some bloggage:

The peculiar smarminess of online mourning, by the great Monica Hesse at the WashPost.

The best of prom 2012, compiled by Buzzfeed.

Have a great long weekend, all.

I should leave this stuff to Roy, but I recently started reading Rod Dreher’s blog again. God knows why, because he often drives me nuts, but evidently I need a certain amount of that stuff in my daily run, and Lileks isn’t doing it anymore. Today, he takes on a wrenching New York magazine piece by Michael Wolff on the long, slow decline of his mother.

It was brutal, and I couldn’t get all the way through it. The headline was brilliant: “I love you, Mom.” Sub: “I also wish you were dead.” Sub-sub: “And I expect you do, too.” If you’ve already been through this, you know the way these things go — the pain, the suffering, the indignity and, worst of all, the towering, senseless expense — $17,000 per month in nursing care for Wolff’s mother, who hasn’t been able to walk, talk or take care of herself for a year and a half. He goes on about this and that at some length before announcing he’s planning a different exit strategy for himself, and he’s pretty blunt about it:

Not long after visiting my insurance man those few weeks ago, I sent an “eyes wide open” e-mail to my children, all in their twenties, saying this was a decision, to buy long-term-care insurance or not, they should be in on: When push came to shove, my care would be their logistical and financial problem; they needed to think about what they wanted me to do and, too, what I wanted them to do. But none of them responded—I suppose it was that kind of e-mail.

Anyway, after due consideration, I decided on my own that I plainly would never want what LTC insurance buys, and, too, that this would be a bad deal. My bet is that, even in America, even as screwed up as our health care is, we baby-boomers watching our parents’ long and agonizing deaths won’t do this to ourselves. We will surely, we must surely, find a better, cheaper, quicker, kinder way out.

Meanwhile, since, like my mother, I can’t count on someone putting a pillow over my head, I’ll be trying to work out the timing and details of a do-it-yourself exit strategy. As should we all.

Dreher reads this, and sniffs: “Appalling.” He goes on to lay out his own situation, with his father:

He is 77, and in poor health, though not suffering from dementia. He’s got a bad heart, and all kinds of aches and pains, the result of a rough-and-tumble country-boy life (e.g., he used to rodeo as a young man). He is in near-constant pain in his hip, and has to use a cane to get around. I don’t know when he has last felt good. You can’t believe the medicines the poor man has to take every day, just to maintain. He’s getting too feeble to do much more than sit in his chair.

And all I could think was: Do you have any idea how easy you have it? A father with “all kinds of aches and pains” who is still lucid and ambulatory? As these things go, that’s a blessing from heaven. When my parents died, I decided the measure of a good end of life was the brevity of the interval between creaky-but-taking-care-of-yourself, that is, perpendicular to the floor, and bedridden-and-entirely-dependent-on-others, i.e., parallel to it. For my mother, this interval was five years, for my father, about two weeks. If you can have a conversation with your parent? If you aren’t smelling their pee, or if they’re still in their own house? That is wealth beyond rubies, and when the crisis comes, if you have a lucid, kind and pragmatic medical team to advise you? You are even richer. Alan’s mom spent a few months in assisted living before pitching forward onto her noggin and raising a subdural hematoma that eventually proved fatal. This still required an ambulance ride to Toledo on Christmas Day so that another medical team could state the obvious and send her home to hospice, where she died a few days later.

My point vis-a-vis Dreher being: If you could read that essay and still find the writer’s honestly stated vow to not inflict that on his own children “appalling,” well, I need to stop reading this sort of bullshit, because life is too short.

And I don’t need to remind you who we have to thank for setting common sense back a few more decades, do I? (She-Who!!!) Wolff, again:

I do not know how death panels ever got such a bad name. Perhaps they should have been called deliverance panels. What I would not do for a fair-minded body to whom I might plead for my mother’s end.

The alternative is nuts: to look forward to paying trillions and to bankrupting the nation as well as our souls as we endure the suffering of our parents and our inability to help them get where they’re going. The single greatest pressure on health care is the disproportionate resources devoted to the elderly, to not just the old, but to the old old, and yet no one says what all old children of old parents know: This is not just wrongheaded but steals the life from everyone involved.

And that is not appalling at all. It’s just the truth.

I’m not really in as bad a mood as I might seem to be. My advance medical directives are pretty clear. They say, “…and I understand these actions may result in my death.” Ego te absolvo.

While we’re there, another good read from NYMag, not so grim: An account of George Romney’s run for president in 1968 and, along the way, the beginning of the end of moderate Republicanism. My fellow Michiganders probably know all this well, but I was a mere girl then, and I didn’t know all the details, many of which are both sad and funny, as this story about the start of Romney’s campaign, in fall 1967, with a tour of ghettos in 17 cities, where the candidate talked about civil rights. That was, shall we say, a message that fell on deaf ears:

In Watts one day, Romney and Lenore were sitting in the back of a sedan, being chauffeured to the airport by a local driver, with Romney’s bodyguard riding shotgun. According to a story that circulated all through the campaign, Romney leaned forward: “Say, what is that word they keep saying to me? I don’t understand, it begins with an M…” The driver and the bodyguard racked their brains as Romney tried to pronounce it, working his western consonants around an inner-city accent. Then the driver straightened up and said, “Governor, I think what they’re saying is”—and here he let his voice get kind of ghetto—“mo’fucka.” And then, because Romney was legendarily a Mormon and these vulgarities may have been somewhat beyond him, the driver clarified: “Motherfucker, sir.” And Romney sank back into his seat, like a part of the car that had been mechanically retracted.

Wow.

A great Bridge yesterday if you’re interested in the ins and outs of municipal finance, addressing the burning issue — yes! I went there! — of fire service. In some ways, firefighters are like dentists, victims of their own success at upgrading building codes and preaching prevention. Fewer fires are being fought — half as many in 2010 as there were in 1977 — but you still need a force down in the firehouse. The question is what kind, and how do you train and work them? You can hit the main Bridge link in this paragraph, or the individual stories in the RSS feed over there on the right rail.

Eye candy: Classic children’s literature as minimalist posters.

Finally, how the Hawaiian authorities gave the birther-curious Arizona secretary of state a taste of his own medicine. Hilarious. (And hey, it appears to have worked.)

Happy Wednesday to you.