I can’t tell you enough what a good time Saturday’s Tour de Troit was, even though I rode all by my little lonesome, the other two-thirds of my family SO busy with THEIR lives they couldn’t be bothered to rise at dawn and take a three-hour bike ride with mom. But so what? I do lots of things alone, and found plenty of people to talk to among the 4,000 or so rolling along with me. The weather was perfect and the route was great — Detroit high to low, crack houses to manor houses, with a lap of Belle Isle and a crisp McIntosh apple thrown in. And lunch. With beer. None of which I drank, as it was 11 a.m. and I had a day of chores ahead. So I found a table of thirsty-looking guys, and gave them my final food and drink tickets.

I should have given my extra ticket to Dexter. He could have put one of his 37 specialized bikes into the van, driven up and rolled on out with me. Would have been a crazy early start for a night owl like him, though. Maybe next time.

I just realized what-all my week will entail, looked at my calendar and groaned. If I miss a day this week, don’t bother with search parties. It’s just me, exhausted and weeping, trying to make a 50-hour week run with five hours of sleep, nightly.

But so we can get it started in the same fashion it will likely end, how about a bunch of tossed-off bloggage?

We seem to be on a capital-punishment jag here, so one more, a column about what it was like to be in the crowd outside Troy Davis’ execution. Sounds a lot like the Tim McVeigh death carnival in 2001, i.e. a reporter-to-protestor ratio of about 10:1, and not much news to report other than, “it’s going to happen in two hours” and “it happened 20 minutes ago.”

It did jog my memory, however, to when my friend Ron French (with whom I worked at TimFest) covered an execution of a Michigan man in Florida, years previous. There’s a wire-service reporter at those things who, like the Atlanta reporter linked above, has seen more men lose their lives than an infantryman in a war zone. The protestors, pro and con, all know one another, shake hands and ask after one another’s kids. They keep their signs in their car trunks, and some of them are looking a little worn out.

The wire-service reporter told a story about how, back in the electric-chair days, the liner on the chair’s cap finally wore out, probably from overuse. It’s a sea sponge which is saturated in salt water before it’s fitted on the condemned man’s head, and aids in conducting the charge through the body. When it wore out, some genius at the prison, probably looking to save taxpayer dollars, replaced it with a common cellulose sea sponge. Which burst into flames during the event, upsetting everyone and very likely hastening the era of lethal injection.

A few of you have asked, in the past, what my problem is with Jennifer Granholm, who always looked so smart and presentable on “Meet the Press” while she was governor of Michigan. I think my Wayne State colleague Jack Lessenberry gets to the heart of it in his review of what seems to be her laughably awful memoir. A friend of mine suggested some staged readings might be fun to do, and with passages like this, of course I’m waving my hand in the air, volunteering to play Jenny:

Actually, the book, which is subtitled The Fight for Jobs and America’s Economic Future, is so appallingly bad it is weirdly fascinating, starting with the weird, stilted dialogue it claims were real conversations, mainly between husband and wife.

What they actually sound like are Ayn Rand characters who have learned a whole lot of psychobabble. (“His words finally pierced my hard, self-pitying armor. It was my ego that was sucking me down.” Finally, she told him “Thanks for caring so much.”)

Mark Bittman takes on the “junk food is cheaper than broccoli” canard and finds: No, it’s not. This is not exactly a state secret, which we’ve discussed here many times before — oh, my little smartlings, you make this job so rewarding — but I have to pull back at his solution, which is to turn Mickey D’s into the new Philip Morris. Just what the culture war needs: Another front.

Finally, one for Cooz: A chapter from North Carolina’s history of social engineering, i.e., aggressive sterilization programs for the poor, feeble-minded and, of course, promiscuous. The reveal is who presided over these programs for decades — one Wallace Kuralt, father of Charles the Beloved.

And now I must get moving. Happy week to you. As for me, I just hope to endure it, and make a few deadlines.

Big news out of Georgia yesterday: R.E.M. (or is it REM? Periods or no periods?) is breaking up. To touch on yesterday’s discussion, this seems like the sort of iconic news event for whatever the phenomenon is where you hear something like that and think, “Huh. I thought they were dead.”

I didn’t think R.E.M. was dead, but one of them had some health issues a while back — brain tumor, maybe? A quick glance at the indisputably authoritative Wikipedia says no, it was a brain aneurysm, it was Bill Berry, and he left in 1997, at which point it’s safe to say I was no longer paying attention. “Green” (1988) was the last album I bought, although I think “Automatic for the People” (1992) is lying around here somewhere. A guy I knew in the Fort had a one-night fling with Michael Stipe when they passed through Bloomington on tour.

And when I reread those two paragraphs, I am reminded why one should never tattoo one’s enthusiasms on one’s body. There was a time when I wore the grooves down on “Murmur” and “Reckoning” and the rest of the early catalog, and if the tattooing thing had had any traction then, I might have opted for a discreet “Radio Free Europe” inside an ankle. They were my favorite band in the last time in my life when I thought I needed to make such a designation. Such things are only evident in hindsight, and thank heavens for that, eh?

As (a very small) part of this enthusiasm, J.C. and Sam and I day-tripped to Athens when I visited them in Atlanta one year. We made the drive noticing all the parallels between Georgia’s Athens and Ohio’s, which is where J.C. and I became friends: It’s a college town about 90 miles east of a large city. The road there starts out a traditional interstate, then becomes a plain old four-lane. And once you get there, well, you’ve got your traditional college town, which immediately sets off the ache of nostalgia and familiarity in anyone who ever spent time in one. You want to stop the students on the street and tell them savor every moment and stop snoozing through your comp lit class and you’ll never live like this again (nor want to).

And then we visited the Uga graves — that’s pronounced “ugga” — and the Tree that Owns Itself and ate in one of those places every college town has, probably a vegetarian/locavore/Moosewood hippie trough, and visited a bookstore. Then, while near a courthouse-lawn cannon, Sam said she thought the guns still had some mobility to them, so I put my hands on the barrel of one and pushed down, and whaddaya know, it moved, and poured about a gallon of accumulated rainwater, no doubt mixed with discarded beer and frat-boy pee, onto my shoes.

Then we went home. Now that I think of it, I was probably already pretty much over R.E.M. by then.

The other big news out of Georgia yesterday was the execution of Troy Davis, of which you have probably heard enough to at least make up your mind about the morality of the act. I have rather studiously avoided death-penalty arguments over the years, although I have my opinions about it. In general, I think: Some form of it will always be with us, because Americans are bloodthirsty people. We have almost certainly executed innocent men and women, and we will almost certainly do it again, and maybe the people of Georgia did it last night. And I’m against it, not enough for the Full Prejean but enough that I admire those who make its opposition their life’s work.

My ambitions are more modest — to get people to stop using “electrocute” as a synonym for “shock.” No one recovers from an electrocution.

OK, so: Speaking of Helen Prejean, which makes me think of movies, it’s now September, which means the list of movies I must see is already growing. So far: “Contagion” and “Drive.” Anyone with fewer weekend commitments seen them yet? What am I missing? I was going to avoid “Contagion” on general Paltrow-ish principle, but it’s my understanding she dies early and the rest of the film is “Traffic”-esque, which I loved.

We haven’t discussed the post office here, have we? You’ve probably heard about the organization’s financial problems, which set off the usual clamor in the well-paid flying monkeys of the conservative chattering classes (Roy’s got you covered there). It so happens I needed to get something in hard copy to the other side of the country in a two-day time frame not long ago, and alas, it was a Sunday. (This was a parcel consisting of about 100 pages of paper, letter-size.) My first stop was FedEx, thinking that was my only alternative. No, they couldn’t absolutely, positively get it there overnight, but they could get it there by Tuesday, for … the lady put it on the scale … $54.

“Are you kidding me?” I gasped. Of course not. I rechecked my requirements, found I only needed it to be postmarked by Monday, so I went to the post office the next day, and Express Mailed it for $18. It got there Tuesday, same as the FedEx package would have, for $36 less. Just so you get a sense of what we’re in for, in a USPS-free world.

Everybody saw this yesterday, but just in case you didn’t: Elizabeth Warren, bringing the Awesome.

Alas, work beckons. And the lawn-service trucks just pulled up outside, which means soon I won’t be able to hear myself think, let alone think of jangle guitars. Happy Thursday.

Hm. Newspaper says John Conyers may be vulnerable this time, that the winds of change, redistricting and marriage to a felon might be enough to sink his ship in the Democratic primary. But it’s hard for me to get past the first paragraph, which describes him as “iconic.” That’s my new pet-peeve word, a fancy-sounding adjective thrown in as vocabulary filler when you want to sound smart, like some otherwise inedible foodstuff tossed into the granola.

Iconic (adj.) — having the qualities of an icon.
Icon (n.) — a painting of a religious figure on wood; a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something; a symbol or graphic representation on a video display terminal of a program, option, or window.

Is an 82-year-old, cemented-in-office congressman iconic? I guess you could stretch the term that far, but that word, I do not think it means what the writer thought it meant.

Did you know Wikipedia has a page on cultural icons? With photos? Some cultural icons of Austria — wiener schnitzel, strudel, Mozart, Freud, Schwarzenegger. But not Jean-Claude Van Damme? I’m disappointed.

If you read the original story I linked to, you will come across a pollster named “Bernie Porn.” Oh, my.

Someone in my Twitter feed described a 48-year-old actor as “venerable.” That is, “accorded a great deal of respect, esp. because of age, wisdom, or character.” This is Wendell Pierce we’re talking about here. Disallowed. I’m sure he’s a nice guy and a fine actor, but no one under 50 gets to be goddamn venerable.

If the content of this blog is ever published between hard covers, I hope the subtitle is: A sleepy writer in search of coherence, most mornings. How do you come up with things to write about five days a week, Nance? I don’t. I make a pot of coffee, I open the laptop, I drink the coffee and I close the laptop sometime later. How it happens, I’m not sure.

And while it work some days, other days it doesn’t, so let’s go bloggage-ing. I have to be downtown in an hour, and it’s plain I haven’t had nearly enough coffee.

A good read for this, or any day: the absolutely true story of a Holly Golightly for the stripper-embezzlement age.

Terrorism at the pancake house yesterday, a car bomb in the exurbs today. Welcome to WTF America.

Finally, as so frequently happens, when I’m having a bad day, Tom & Lorenzo are having a pretty good one. Note: They are always having a pretty good one. But I loved their Emmy-gown roundups, especially this one, for the great description of Katie Holmes and the photo immediately below, of Kerry Washington, notable because you can so clearly see the big-head/lollipop-people thing that so many film actors have going on. (I have an enormous head, too, but it’s balanced by an enormous body. No Zak Posen gowns for me.)

Me, I’m off to maybe score a black-bean wrap at the Wayne State Wednesday farmer’s market. Maybe that can improve my day.

Kate’s band played a gig Sunday, providing entertainment at a rest stop on the Tour de Ford, a bike tour/fundraiser for indigent patient care in the Henry Ford Health Systems.

I immediately dashed off a note to my old pal, hospital administrator Dr. Frank Byrne, thanking the entire health-care industry for all they do to help struggling kid bands get that all-important experience. Po is down to a power trio now, following the resignation of their vocalist, but they still sound pretty tight, and even though the other band on the bill was more of a crowd-pleaser, with their classics-heavy repertoire, Po got showmanship points for being pretty girls, and for not having to read their lyrics off a music stand. (Hey, I’d have had to read the lyrics to Cole Porter tunes, approximately the same interval of composition-to-performance as it is for a kid of today to sing “Sunshine of Your Love.”)

But perhaps the greatest thrill came at the end, when most of the cyclists had already rolled through, eaten their bananas and apples, refilled their CamelBaks and headed out for the next leg. An old woman who lives nearby tottered up and demanded that we TURN IT DOWN. You’re not really a rokker until someone tells you to turn it down. She stayed for a good half hour, bitching at a security guard about how THIS HOSPITAL IS TERRIBLE FOR THE NEIGHBORHOOD, etc. To which I can only speak from experience: One, if you think an operating hospital is bad for your neighborhood, try a shuttered one, and two, obviously she was lonely and wanted someone to talk to. Poor old angry lady. Someday she’s going to be glad there’s an ER across the street.

So. Horrible-busy day, and I’m thinking we should do some tasty bloggage and dash — the equivalent of a piece of toast on the run for breakfast. Soooo…

With apologies to your aviation fans out there, I have never understood air shows. I guess it takes all kinds, but the thought of craning my neck for a few hours to watch pilots do loop-de-loops has always seemed downright boring. (You are free to have the same opinion about watching horses jump fences.) The more modern air shows, which amp up the thrills with dangerous stunts and gimmicks like extreme low-altitude “racing” — you’d have to walk me there with a loaded shotgun at my back. And here’s why. That is all.

This was a hard story to read, about the new poor. It’s hard not to believe this is the twisted root of something, and it ain’t the Tea Party and it ain’t whatever else you might think it is:

It’s hard to find some of the poorest residents in Pembroke, Ill. They live in places like the tree-shaded gravel road where the Bargy family’s dust-smudged trailer is wedged in the soil, flanked by overgrown grass.

By the official numbers, Pembroke’s 3,000 residents are among the poorest in the region, but the problem may be worse. The mayor believes as many as 2,000 people were uncounted, living far off the paths that census workers trod.

The staples that make up the town square are gone: No post office, no supermarket, no pharmacy, no barber shop or gas station. School doors are shuttered. The police officers were all laid off, a meat processing plant closed. In many places, light switches don’t work, and water faucets run dry. Residents let their garbage smolder on their lawn because there’s no truck to take it away; many homes are burned out.

A new populist revolt? I don’t see why not.

But let our hearts be light on this Monday in the still-fair month of September. Was it Moe who nominated the story about Gordon Ramsey’s porn dwarf double dying in a badger den as best headline ever? This may well top it.

Ugh, I’m growing to despise Mondays. I hope yours is tol’rable.

Well, this sort of defines good news/bad news. I woke up early to find a voicemail from Alex on my phone. Thinking he was drunk-dialing me — the time stamp was 1:47 a.m. — I retrieved the message to confirm.

Hey, just calling from cardiac ICU at Lutheran Hospital!

Whoa. I hasten to add that exclamation point was a cheery whistle past the graveyard, not a dying gasp, but he was there for a reason. After suffering jaw and arm pain, he mentioned it to his partner Harry, who suggested he should maybe stop by an ER and get himself checked out. An EKG, an ambulance ride, and a middle-of-the-night angioplasty left him with a stent and three nights of lodging at the usual inflated prices.

The good news: The tests showed no significant damage to his heart muscle, and he and Harry will finally have some serious motivation to quit smoking once and for all.

He said he welcomes your good wishes and tributes, and will be back snarking with us as soon as he gets a laptop. You can leave them in the usual place.

Sudden glimpses of our mortality are no fun, are they? I visited my ladyparts doctor last month and got the big three of the crone testing package — Pap, mammogram and my first baseline bone scan. The first two came back clean and clear, but the bone scan showed low bone mineral density stopping well short of osteopenia, but dammitall anyway. I’m back on calcium, which I had been taking but quit for a few months, following one too many late-night shifts spent reading about the conditions in Chinese factories. I decided any supplement that couldn’t be sourced to a nice clean North American facility — and none of them can — could be safely replaced with a sharp Cheddar and extra serving of yogurt. I’ve always been a milk drinker. But my test says I need to go back on the C, and so I am. I pause to note there are side effects. I would say I’m as constipated as a Missouri Synod Lutheran, but that would be cruel, so let me just say: There are side effects. And lots of water and vegetables seems to be taking care of them, but still.

I’ve been a weight lifter for years, which I thought would protect me, but it turns out you can’t outrun your gene pool. And old saws like “you still have your health” have a new, sharper meaning.

So, with that, I think it’s entirely appropriate that we go for a silly, fun, life-affirming bloggage collection today, and trash the only thing I’d set aside, which was the usual grumpy Jane Brody column about the obesity epidemic, although here it is, if you want to read it. It’s not all that grumpy, and sort of annoyingly on point, with today’s subject matter.

Laughter is the best medicine, so how about yet another story from Coozledad that made me guffaw? This…

I was wearing a shirt my ex-girlfriend had given me. It was a gauzy Indian prince thing that showed my bluish ribcage and my tiny pale nipples, shrieking for oxygen and nutrients. If you were to hold a pistol to my temporal bone and force me put the same shirt on now, it would look like someone trying to strain an entire village’s yearly production of mozzarella though a decorative cheesecloth.

…is but one of the many knee-slappers therein. Although, C., you need to take another look at your coding. Double-return after your paragraphs. I’m not seeing any breaks.

Cute Overload, just because.

One of those funny sign collections, also just because. But some chuckles are therein.

Feel free to add whatever you like, because obviously I’m scraping bottom here. And it’s Tuesday, which is the second crush day of my week, so I must run. Get well soon, Alex — we need you here.

It rained all day yesterday. Every time I checked the radar for an idea of when it might stop — the wind was blowing, so it should have been headed somewhere — it seemed the same little scrap of precipitation was more or less circling over southeast Michigan. Sometimes it would rain hard, sometimes it would just drip a little, but it never actually stopped.

So when Kate came home with her school-supply list, it seemed like a good time to hit Staples. As Staples go, ours is probably a bare-minimum footprint, tucked as it is into a pre-war urban neighborhood. Still, it has plenty of parking, although it’s rare to see more than a dozen cars there at a time. Not last night. No supply lists were mailed or posted online in advance of the school year; students show up on day one with a pen, and come home with a list. Which means that instead of shopping the sales in August, or spreading the purchase out over a couple of weeks here and there, every parent in the district is at Staples on the second evening of the school year. I saw more familiar faces than at the orientation meeting the previous night. And after all the binders, paper, pens and suchlike had been thrown in the cart, I confronted the big purchase — the graphing calculator. The least expensive of the three acceptable models was sold out. The second one was in stock, for a mere $125.

“Are you kidding me?” I asked the nice Staples guy who was helping me sort things out. I looked at the bulky package, and noted all the selling points — acceptable for use during the SAT/ACT! USB cord included! Carries you through algebra II, calculus and trigonometry! “Does it make coffee or something?”

It does not. It just costs an arm and a leg. The priciest option — the one with the color screen — was $150. So the Texas Instruments TI-84 it was, and no, they didn’t have any pink ones. I’m told the cost will drop to $109.99 after mail-in rebates, which I am so totally getting. The cashier asked if I’d like to make a donation to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Detroit, which will use the money for school supplies. Oh, hell yes. I can’t imagine being a parent in that city, with all the mountains you must climb just to get your children an education, confronting the news that now your high-schooler needs a $100 calculator to take geometry. Take my money, please.

At least I’m enrolled in the rewards program.

In a college TV production class, we were required to write and perform in a 30-second commercial for a product of our choosing. Mine was a Casio four-function hand-held calculator. My selling point was that you don’t need a square-root key to balance your checkbook. “It adds, subtracts, multiplies and divides — what more do you need?” I got an A.

Amusing detail from the product listing in the Staples circular: Among the classes the TI-84 is suitable for? “English/Language Arts.” Ha ha ha ha ha.

A big teaching chore awaits me today, so here goes with the bloggage:

A Texas wildfire on the march. A YouTube video, but taken with a tripod. As irritating as all-day rain can be, the alternative can be far worse. Actually, whenever I see the meteorological contrasts our country is capable of, I think about the day, which I expect to see in my lifetime, when the southwest finally stops hemming and hawing and makes its case for a transcontinental water pipeline to bring some H2O from chill, overcast and soggy Michigan to sunny, warm Arizona. That’s the day I start pouring sugar into bulldozer gas tanks.

While we’re at YouTube, a friend posted this clip from “2001: A Space Odyssey” today — Hal’s death scene. I’d forgotten how moving it is. Hal was voiced by one of the actors from the Stratford Shakespeare company, and if you want to know how to make a computer voice emotional without changing its machine-like quality by one iota, well, there’s your scene. I don’t know how he does it, but I guess that’s why he’s the pro.

And while we’re still on YouTube, this was served as a “related” video to the fire clip — a Pomeranian puppy, howling. We aren’t amusing ourselves to death, we’re drowning in Cute.

At the goading of some of you, who were discussing it in comments, I turned on the GOP debate last night. Good. GOD. A nation of more than 300 million, a vulnerable president, and this is the alternative? Was that a cheer I heard when the Texas death penalty was mentioned? Who are you people?

Via Mitch Harper in the Fort, a look at Southtown Mall in that city, late, unlamented, but one of the city’s fabulous ruins, for a time. I forgot about that Orange Julius.

Finally, for a good cry, this, the eternal mystery of the human heart.

And I think that’s it. I can smell weekend in the air — can you?

We had a whack Labor Day weekend — Friday’s and Saturday’s temperatures were in the high 90s, and by Monday, they’d fallen 40 degrees, which sort of ruined my plans to spend summer’s final day at the pool, listening to the traditional last-day DJ set. Oh, well. Kate and I saw “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” on one of the steamy days, because sometimes you just need the extra kick only movie-theater air conditioning can provide.

I was delighted to be delighted by the film, which was great fun and surprisingly moving and aw hell MONKEYS ON THE RAMPAGE OOK OOK OOK. I’m sorry trailers nowadays have to give away the whole damn movie, because it would have been wonderful to have the big battle scene take you by surprise, but no. Everyone who’s even seen a TV ad knows it happens on the Golden Gate Bridge. The CGI effects are wonderful, with some liberties taken. Here’s an actual chimp:

Here’s the digital chimp, Caesar, from the film:

As you can see, the unstable pharmaceutical substance that gives the ape species its super intelligence also gives it standard-issue human eyes. Eyes were the secret of E.T., too, although I hated that movie and would happily have subjected the little extraterrestrial to a full government interrogation. Chimpanzees I can identify with. But it’ll take more than eyes to make me fall.

Anyway, “Rise” needed a subtitle: The radicalization of a young primate, say, or a sexier poster line: Abu Ghraib, with even more hair than Khalid Sheik Muhammed. The apes rise for very good reasons, and the battle on the bridge would be commemorated in heroic sculpture once the new ape society is in place, but we have to leave something for the sequel.

Yesterday was the first day of school around here, and the weather stayed cool, segueing into the sort of overcast and chill rain today that includes everything but the Goodyear blimp flying a banner: IT’S OVER, FOLKS. I’m not entirely devastated by it; there’s always a point at which you’re ready to start wearing long pants again. I did buy a pair of new Teva sandals on late-season clearance, and I love them so it would be nice if I could continue showing my toes for a few more weeks. So let’s jump to the bloggage, showing our toes all the while:

Jim at Sweet Juniper took the kids to Sleeping Bear Dunes this summer, and had trouble making the climb. Fortunately, he gave us an account of the experience. Funny.

Don’t let Joe Nocera’s column about the loss of middle ground in Washington make you think you’ve read it all before. There’s some good detail here:

“This is not a collegial body anymore,” (Rep. Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee) said. “It is more like gang behavior. Members walk into the chamber full of hatred. They believe the worst lies about the other side. Two senators stopped by my office just a few hours ago. Why? They had a plot to nail somebody on the other side. That’s what Congress has come to.”

Alan and I went to Windsor for dinner one night last summer, and it was sorta meh. Windsor used to have a thriving restaurant scene, I’m told, and U.S. visitors came often to its Italian, Chinese and other districts. Now that you need a passport and a tolerance for potential border searches, business has fallen significantly. Yet another 9/11 story, this on the explosion of the border-control industry in our region. It was a good decade to wear a badge, apparently. One day, perhaps we naked apes will rise in revolt.

And with that, I must skedaddle. Holiday weeks mean extra work.

Is there a curse more cruel than a blank page and a blinking cursor? (Well, duh — cancer, pestilence, ungrateful children.) My mind feels as empty as a bucket at the moment, my concerns few and my resources close at hand (coffee). I moved out to the living room to write because Ruby’s here, posing. For a while she held the stretched-out-low-ears-up position, a relaxed rabbit yoga favorite. But then I came into the room and FEAR RUN PREDATORS, but she stuck around, washed herself for a bit, binkied on the couch and did the Watership Down stretch, so I guess she’s feeling pretty good today.

Labor Day weekend, the end of summer. We’ll get another month of shirtsleeve weather, maybe two, but school starts Tuesday and a new schedule will take over the house. I’m googling “new ideas for school lunches” and otherwise meandering around the internet in search of inspiration, which I am not finding. I did find this, however:

May I just say how tiresome I find the Gannett YourCityNameHere.MomsLikeMe.com section? I vividly remember early motherhood, how isolated and unsure I felt, how much I wished my best friend lived next door, and I suppose that audience is a fat pigeon waiting to be plucked, a sheep ripe for fleecing, but please. A section like this on a newspaper’s website automatically drains 50 IQ points from everything that comes in contact with it. MomsLikeMe are always feeling outrage over something stupid, like a T-shirt. For a while I was clipping particularly dumb MomsLikeMe copy, hoping to get a column or essay out of it, until I found the research too tiresome and depressing. When they’re not expressing outrage over T-shirts, MomsLikeMe are looking for lessons in disaster. The stupidest reaction piece to any breaking-news story is the “experts advise on how to talk to your kids about what just happened” angle; it makes steam toot out my ears in comical cartoon fashion. I wonder if the abandoned draft of that piece still sits in my Google Docs…why hey, it does! Started and abandoned in the summer of 2009, here’s how it went:

It’s been a bad year for teen drivers in metro Detroit. Early this summer, five young people died when their car was hit by a train. Just a month or two later, a car being driven at an insane speed entered a subdivision, lost control and hit a brick welcome sign with enough force to fold the car almost 90 degrees and kill all three occupants, ages 19, 17 and 19.

The first story had everything — a teen driving with a suspended license, a 14-year-old victim who’d just been scolded by her mother, eyewitnesses, even a security-cam video of the incident. The second was nearly as vivid; the speeding car clipped a riding lawn mower in the instant before the crash. You’d think a newspaper staff would have all it could handle just reporting the bare facts, but when I looked at the Detroit Free Press website on day three of the train-crash story, there was something more, a “refer line” to a related story.

Is crash a teachable moment? beckoned a link. After the second accident, a similar come-on: Local parent says her “heart is just breaking” over this news.

Not so long ago, these would have been links to a sort of hand-wringing sidebar that seeks to make sense of the senseless, in which an “expert” from a local university or hospital advises parents on how to discuss the tragedy with teen drivers, or some such earnest mush. For a while, “reader service” was all the rage among newspaper editors, and it was thought this kind of carbuncle hanging off a big story would help the bad news go down easier.

But it’s a different world in newspapers today. Both links took me to something even worse than advice from a pediatrician: A “moms like me” website.

With modern families scattered coast to coast, the internet provides the support your mother used to, before she retired to a golf course in Scottsdale. Today’s moms have it so much easier, free to turn on Nick Jr. and sit with their laptops in an electronic coffee klatch with her girlfriends, wherever they may be. The mom sites — city-dot-momslikeme.com is the Gannett brand, but there are others — are looking to cut the contemporary mother out of the newspaper-readership herd and heap her with lots of specialized content. Or, as Indianapolis Star editor Dennis Ryerson wrote in 2007, announcing Indianapolis’ mom-site debut:

“Moms represent a critical user group with huge buying power and a longing for outside contacts and advice. They lead incredibly busy lives and want information that is easy to access, full of utility and as warm and refreshing as their own children. IndyMoms.com focuses on three main elements: social networking, calendars, and photos, lots of photos of children having fun. It’s a living, breathing site where moms meet each other and set their own agenda.”

So far, so good. As a former newspaper journalist myself, I can hardly argue with any publisher wanting to find a new way to make a little money in this dying game. But as a reader, I resent it when I click the second link, the “heart is just breaking” one, and read this:

“talking about being a safe driver, yes, yes, but there were more passengers killed than drivers, so it seems we need to moreso focus on talking about keeping yourself from being an unintentional victim of someone else’s bad judgement, and that is harder. I dunno why I started this thread… check, I know, my heart is just breaking and I had to say something but I just don’t know what to say”

Those earnest sidebars about how to talk to your kids about 9/11 suddenly seem positively Pulitzer-worthy.

—–

2011 me again: Eh, a good start, but I’m not sure where I wanted to go with it. To say MomsLikeMe sux? That’s a blogger’s job nowadays, so here you go. Funny how Ryerson said moms lead “incredibly busy lives.” To read a MomsLikeMe site, you’d think all they had to do was sit around reloading their browsers and pasting dumb Facebook statuses. MomsLikeMe, take your kids to the park — you’ll be a happier mom, and so will your kids.

And now look what happened — I got some inspiration. Nothing like coffee, a rabbit and the Gannett Corp. to give the morning a push.

I guess I’ll take Labor Day off with the rest of the proletariat, so look for me again on Tuesday. A little bloggage before I go? Sure:

I have but a single rabbit, but Coozledad’s vegetarian petting zoo is far more populated. Hello, Skinnerbox.

Uncle Sam puts on his suin’ pants. I’d say it’s about time, but I’m sure someone will figure out a way to spin this as detrimental to the financial industry at this critical juncture in the economic crisis.

A week in the red tent: A year of Biblical womanhood, taken literally.

With that, I wish you a fine weekend. See you Tuesday.

Our local NPR affiliate carries a show called Soundcheck, and on my drive home yesterday I caught a feature called the Soundcheck Smackdown, which on most days sounds like the arguments between the record-store clerks in “High Fidelity,” only not as funny.

Yesterday’s discussion was over the most influential figure in popular music in the last quarter-century. The host nominated Steve Jobs. Most of the rest of the free world disagreed. I noted many of the comments were yet more of the Steve Jobs hate that some have been expressing since the Apple CEO stepped down from his position, presumably to await the fate coming for us all.

A couple stipulations here: Y’all know I’m a Mac girl. I don’t revere Jobs in any way, although I do respect him. I’m on record as saying, “It’s an operating system, not a religion,” despite how many people want to treat it as such. My loyalty to Macs goes back to when I bought my first computer in 1994, and learned that formatting a floppy in the Windows OS would require a series of commands including colons, backslashes and the like. In the Mac, I’d get a window that said, “This appears to be an unformatted disk. Would you like to format it?” Sold. I knew, when I handed over my credit card, that I was paying a steep premium for that ease of use, but I was a total dolt with MS-DOS, and I knew that if the curtain of Windows was ever pulled back — and it often was, with that generation of PCs — I’d be powerless.

In subsequent years, both systems have improved immensely. But I like my Macs, and will remain a customer. They speak my language.

During those years, I occasionally come across someone who will remark, “Oh, you have one of those toy computers,” when they see the apple on the case. “When are you going to buy a real one?” I sometimes ask them if they’d buy a car you had to raise the hood on several times a week, just to get it started. A computer is a tool I use to do my work. I don’t want to spend time fixing my tools.

But man, ever since Jobs announced his exit from the company’s top office, the vitriol. Much of it has been in comment sections and hence, not credible, but you have to wonder about a person who would cheer the impending death of someone because that person made a product they disapproved of — that wasn’t poison gas or electric chairs.

I’ve been particularly interested in Jobs’ patents, a story that splashed in the big papers the day after his announcement, which I have to figure was planted by Apple. To be frank, I don’t know if I’d like to work for him — while an undeniable nurturer of creativity, he also had the sort of micromanaging style that has always made me nuts. That said, he had enough creative people who would die for him that I imagine he kept it under control when he had to.

What a late start today. Sorry, I’m down at Wayne, meeting with my students and writing in between. So this blog by Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money strikes a chord, about the financial bind too many college students find themselves in today:

I graduated from college in 1982, in the middle of what would turn out to be the worst post-WWII recession until the current mess. But I had no debt, because I went to an excellent public university that charged very low tuition. This, I realize in retrospect, made a huge difference in regard to my psychic as well as economic health. A few years later I went to a top state law school for not exactly free, but for a low enough price that I could earn the total cost of tuition from summer jobs. Today if I had done exactly the same thing I would be graduating with easily six figures of non-dischargeable educational debt at 7.5% interest.

A couple weeks ago, a former Michigan Supreme Court justice now running the state’s Department of Human Services was the human face on a policy change that ripped the food-stamp rug out from under thousands of Michigan college students who had previously qualified for same. In a staggering Marie Antoinette moment, she said those students should “get a part-time job, like I did,” if they had trouble putting food on the table. I meet my students at this urban university, and I am stunned and awed by the challenges they’re juggling to go to school. Part-time job? Most of them are working at least two, and many are full-time workers who wedge classes in around the edges, along with family responsibilities and many others that would, or should, shame a woman who could say such a thing. Never mind financial aid — these young people work harder than I ever did in school. “Get a part-time job?” Why not get a clue instead.

OK, I need a palate-cleanser. I see Mary threw those krazy Kardashian girls into the mix, here if you missed it. The Kardashian Kollection of — underwear, I guess — is for Sears. Yes, they spell it with a K, just like Khloe and Kourtney and Kim. Never underestimate the power of hustling white trash, I always say. Here’s Tom & Lorenzo on one of Kim’s grocery-shopping outfits. (Does she always have her makeup applied with an airbrush? I need to do some research on these girls.)

And with that, I’d best get rolling.

Today is the first day of classes at Wayne State, which means day one of Nance’s Open House, in which I encourage all my public-affairs reporting students to stop by, meet their online instructor face to face, get briefed on my expectations and so on. In the past, this means I would see three or four students today, two tomorrow, and over the next fortnight receive emails from the rest, offering excuses why they couldn’t make it, and promises they’ll be there next week, etc.

However, in a move designed to curb class-shopping, everyone has to be in-and-committed by next week, so maybe it’ll be different this time. We’ll see. I head off to campus in an hour with my stack of student questionnaires, my class list and a hopeful heart. This summer I had three interns and watched them show actual improvement over the course of the term, so who knows? Maybe I can teach them something.

In keeping with the calendar, it’s overcast and dreary. I will probably forget my OneCard and drop my laptop in a puddle. Transitions are hard.

So with little time to spare, let’s hop, bunny-like, to the bloggage:

Dahlia Lithwick on the Cheney memoir:

Who knows why Cheney wants to keep relitigating torture in the face of a factual record that has concluded for the thousandth time that it is neither effective nor legal. Maybe it’s good for his book sales. All I know is that when almost everyone with any expertise in the matter, and any knowledge of the torture program (up to and including Matthew Alexander and John McCain) says that it hurts more than it helps, Cheney starts to sound a little like the crazy lady in the attic.

Detroit — and many other cities — gets an abysmal score for pedestrian-friendliness. The duh passage:

Metro Detroit isn’t unusual. Many developed areas across the country, especially in high-growth suburbs, feature multi-lane roads with shopping centers and housing developments nearby, but no easy way to walk or bike from one area to another.

This has been my No. 1 complaint about newer suburbs since I was old enough to swing my leg over a bicycle, and it’s sort of appalling it’s only now that it’s being discussed. If developers are going to profit enormously by converting farmland to suburbs, platting worm-bundle street plans leading off former country section roads, and not have a simple paved bike or walking/running trail running between subdivisions, they should share in all the misery that comes with getting from one to another via something other than a motor vehicle. Not that they’re likely to lie awake nights under their million-thread-count sheets fretting about it.

Speaking of suburbia, if you didn’t see this yesterday via comments, how Bill O’Reilly used his own local police as muscle in his domestic dispute. As I think Coozledad remarked, the most depressing thing about this is how readily the cops go along with it. You’d think they’d know better.

With that, I’d best get moving. Onward to the temple of learning!