After two years of owning a pet rabbit, I can report they are…inscrutable. Or maybe too scrutable. All I know is that after 24 months of direct observation and regular interaction with us, Ruby remains a puzzle. I can’t figure out what she’s thinking, other than FEAR RUN PREDATORS.

Work or live with animals for a while, and you swiftly learn that discussions of their intelligence is limited by the arrogance of human primates. No, a rabbit can’t invent a malaria vaccine or discuss the works of Marcel Proust, but she can hear an acorn drop three blocks away and react accordingly FEAR RUN PREDATORS. An animal that is tasty eatin’ for everything with teeth and talons eventually evolves defenses to deal with it, and a lagomorph’s are well known — prodigious breeding, fast runnin’. And those amazing senses.

Our wonderful, departed Jack Russell could be an exhausting pet. Anything could set him off on a tirade of barking, and I yelled “shut up” so often I sometimes wondered if my neighborhood nickname was The Screamer. We’d had him for years before one day we were riding in the car, and he was occupying his usual place — back feet on the back seat, front feet on the console, leaning up against both of our elbows, which were keeping him from climbing into the front. He would ride this way for miles, especially if there was food in the front seat, which there was — we’d stopped for dinner, and I’d carried out a doggie bag of pasta with Italian sausage. I’d given him a little and was leaning forward to get him another nibble when Alan said, “Did you feel that? Feel his chest.” I did; it was noticeably hotter than it had been just a few seconds earlier. “I never knew he could glow red that quickly,” Alan remarked. That rapid infusion of blood to power the muscles to make the leap after the prey — whether a mouse, a rat or a slice of sausage — is something we all do, but not as quickly as terriers.

That’s what interests me about animals, and why I tolerate one like Ruby, who, to be frank, doesn’t begin to fill the dog’s shoes. But I enjoy watching her climb to the top of the sofa and stand on her back feet, sniffing the air. I like to watch her do her binky dance in the morning. I like to take her outside to loaf around in her outdoor pen, where she cocks her head and listens to the squirrels and birds. And then I put her inside, adjust the shade and cover and go back in the house, knowing that when I go back to get her in late afternoon, even though I will put her in a clean cage with fresh food and delicious romaine lettuce, she will run from me, because FEAR RUN PREDATORS. It’s her nature — she really can’t help it.

Tuesday. Another lovely day — summer is leaving on a high note. But work still awaits. So, a little bloggage?

I’m sorry, but who could possibly be this stupid? Ahem:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is facing a new challenge: He’s having trouble raising money from some Jewish donors who mistakenly believe one of his opponents, Michele Bachmann, is Jewish.

Some Jewish donors are telling fund-raisers for Romney, a Mormon, that while they like him, they’d rather open their wallets for the “Jewish candidate,” who they don’t realize is actually a Lutheran, The Post has learned.

“It’s a real problem,” one Romney fund-raiser said. “We’re working very hard in the Jewish community because of Obama’s Israel problem. This was surprising.”

I’d estimate I save at least 80 percent of my email, maybe more. I’ve never, ever understood the “inbox zero” movement, but maybe one of you can explain it. Evidently my strategy isn’t the one to emulate. But it is mine.

OK, time to prep for various teaching-related duties. Sorry for short shrift, but that’s how I roll.

Bad news, which some of you mentioned yesterday in comments — my former colleague Mike Dooley died yesterday, from the sort of health collapse that comes after a life a reporter with an Irish name too often feels compelled to live. In what is perhaps a sad commentary on both contemporary journalism and certainly his last employer, his obit was thin and pallid and captured nothing of the man’s essence, which was robust and funny and unforgettable. Better to read excerpts from his popular column, Dooley Noted, which capture what it was like to sit with him at Henry’s, the bar across the street, and hear his stories. My favorite isn’t in there, about riding the press bus on the Dan Quayle 1988 veep campaign, and schooling the national media on the various smells wafting across the countryside. “They didn’t know bullshit from pigshit, Nall,” he roared at his usual volume, set at a time when newsrooms themselves roared with the white noise of phones, typewriters and teletype machines. “Can you believe it?”

Yes, I can. I also believe the story about the time he passed out drunk at a party, and someone used a Sharpie to draw a map of Ireland high on his bald dome, which he wore for several hours before discovering it. I never like to examine the mirror too closely while hungover, either.

Dooley had been failing for a while, and spent his final days at Parkview Hospital, where his friends and colleagues filled up his Facebook page with notes and stories and Godspeeds. I’m told he read them all, and enjoyed them very much.

And while we’re back home again, more news from the Hoosier State: Hank Stuever put me in his book. My former colleague Robin Yocum put me in his book. Tim Goeglein, if Amazon’s “search inside this book” is to be believed, did not. Damn! What’s a girl gotta do to get some credit up in this joint?

Yes, Tim has written his memoirs. I don’t think I’ll be reading them, or at least not buying them. This is why libraries were invented — to read books by people whose income you don’t want to support, but you still want to see what they have to say. Right? I did the 21st-century version of standing over the table at Border’s — first checked for my name, as well as any indication I might be appearing in a spectral, nameless form (“blogger” isn’t in there, either, and the only Nancy has the last name of Reagan). Then I flipped around via the Surprise Me function. It seems Tim’s mom took some classes at IPFW (that’s the Indiana U./Purdue branch campus in Fort Wayne), where professors described the American family as a tool of women’s oppression. He majored in journalism, because of his love for Ernie Pyle. And so on. (The Ernie Pyle school of journalism at IU has “ivy-covered walls,” I learned. Not plagiarism, just trite and unimaginative.) So what is this book’s cornerstone? Amazon copy:

Goeglein’s unique insider account of why he believes most of the 43rd president’s in-office decisions were made for the greater good, and how many of those decisions could serve as a blueprint for the emergence of a thoughtful, confident conservatism. From a fresh perspective, Goeglein gives behind-the-scenes accounts of key events during that historic two-term administration, reflecting on what was right and best about the Bush years. He was in Florida for the 2000 election recount, at the White House on 9/11, and watched Bush become a reluctant but effective wartime president.

An apologia for George Bush. Just what the world needs. Fie.

OK, some quick bloggage, and then I must fly:

Another horrifying story out of Mexico. It just never stops.

A typo — no, an editing mistake — on the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial. Appalling. And etched in stone, literally.

A good weekend to all, especially Irene-dodgers.

Sorry for the nothing-so-far. The morning started busy, got busier, and as we’ve now passed the magic threshold of noon, it looks like we’ve officially put today in the Fail column.

Do I have anything to report? Not much. Do I have any tasty linkage to follow? I have a little:

Via J.C. Burns’ Twitter, the fabulous Oatmeal guides to grammar and usage. The one on “literally” made me laugh out loud. Literally.

So did this: The 10 most insulting things Anthony Bourdain has said about the Food Network. Bonus: Frank Bruni weighs in. Because this stuff is really important.

Oh, get OUT: Moammar Gadhafi had the hots for Condi Rice? That now makes two men who’ve admitted to that particular…can we call it a kink? Noooo. (I won’t tell you who the other one is. He might be reading this.)

And let that be the end of today, eh? We’ll try for better tomorrow.

This is my goal over the next four years, and foolhardy it may be: To get my daughter admitted to the University of Michigan. She doesn’t have to go there. But as I have told her since we moved here:

1) It’s the best education for the money that we are likely to have available to us; however,
2) If you can get into Michigan, you can get into a lot of other schools. We have money saved, and you’ll be able to get more elsewhere. All bridges will be crossed when we get to them. But for now, aim high. Aim for Ann Arbor.

So. Last year she took two courses that offered high-school credit. She got an A-plus in Spanish I, and a B-plus in Honors Algebra, missing the A by a whisker. Still, a very good start, I thought. Earlier this summer, a letter arrived, informing us that we could have those grades entered on her high school transcript as credit only, or grade and credit. I did what I always do with perplexing or disturbing mail — set it aside for the remainder of the summer.

But now the deadline for deciding is approaching, so I called her high school, figuring the counselors were back on the job by now, and sure enough, the phone was picked up by the person I needed to talk to. Explained what I just told you, and asked her opinion.

“Hmm, well, the thing you don’t want to do is take credit for one and grade and credit for the other,” she said. “That’s a red flag.” Noted. Grade and credit for both, then?

“Well, there’s that B-plus,” she said, as though I’d presented her with a dead mouse or something.

“It’s an honors algebra course,” I pointed out. “Accelerated math.”

“There will be many other factors determining whether she’ll get into Michigan,” she said. “But for now, you want to play it safe. We’ve had students with 4.0 averages not get in.” She advised credit-only. I put down the phone with a variety of emotions, but one swam to the surface first — eye-crossing anger. It just occurred to me what my poor, sweet, smart daughter will be up against to join the student body at my state’s premiere university four years hence. She’ll be angling for one of the spots available for kids who aren’t rich, who aren’t Olympic athletes, who contribute nothing special to the diversity profile, and who aren’t — a burr under my particular saddle, because they’re so thick on the ground hereabouts — a Topsiders-and-madras-shorts-wearing, entitled brat whose lawyer daddy is a legacy.

Four years stretch before me, years of applying the whip on the grades front, and winter months scouting the sorts of fascinating summer camps and volunteer opportunities that will make her stand out in this crowded field. All so my sole offspring can get a toehold into the middle class, a stratum her own parents are rapidly sliding to the edge of. All so she can maybe attend a university I had my own experience with a few years back, filled with undergraduates who didn’t have the sense to change out of flip-flops on a February day, among many other dullards. (This really happened. A girl stopped in front of me to adjust her backpack in the vestibule of a building. I looked down, and beheld her toenail polish. The temperature outside was in the low 30s. I asked her why she was wearing rubber sandals. Her answer: “Because my dorm is, like, really hot.”)

I’ve told this story before, about the UM women’s sport-redacted coach, who complained in one of our Wallace House seminars about her players, who stand like children before her, awaiting orders. “They have to be told when to warm up, when to cool down, what uniforms to wear, when to wash them. It’s like they’ve spent their entire life getting into the back seat and being driven to their appointments.” And they have. Their mothers and fathers have functioned as their personal assistants. They’re like the powerful men I know, whose jobs are so all-consuming they’ve come to rely on their wives to run every other aspect of their lives. One gets a weekly allowance. Srsly.

I don’t want to raise that kind of kid.

I told the counselor, “I’d rather she swing for the fences and miss a few than play it safe for the sake of a grade-point average.” She said playing it safe isn’t enough. You must swing for the fences and clear them, every time, to get into a top college.

Personally, I think she’s full of shit. But for now, credit only.

Perhaps you’re wondering where Kate wants to go to school. (Ha! Like that matters.) The only one she’s mentioned so far is UC/Berkeley, because she remembers Telegraph Avenue from our trip a few years back, and “it seems like a cool place.” Maybe if mom writes three best-sellers in the next four years, we can swing it.

OK, time to hop to the shower and embrace the day. A little bloggage:

Via Nancy Friedman, Hollywood clichés in infographic form. Funny.

That Mark Bittman can even figure out a way to improve spaghetti and meatballs. I think I’m going to try this one.

Neil Steinberg considers the new Michael Jordan Steak House in Chicago:

When you can get a fantastic steak three blocks from your office, why go elsewhere? This is not to ignore Chicago’s other fine steakhouses, in no particular order: Gibson’s, Chicago Cut, The Capital Grille, Smith & Wollensky, Ditka’s, Ruth’s Chris, Sullivan’s, Harry Caray’s, Chicago Chop House, Lawry’s — there are many more, but those are the ones off the top of my head, places that I have patronized.

I haven’t been to the new Michael Jordan Steak House that opened this week in the InterContinental, and frankly, as much as I love the hotel it’s in — my wife and I were married there — I don’t plan to go. You have to wonder at the savvy of somebody who could survey the Chicago restaurant scene and conclude: “What this city needs is another steakhouse!”

And I’m off.

It’s taken a while, but I’ve come to terms with the fact photography just isn’t my strong suit. But a good model can cover for a multitude of sins:

Ah, that U.P. sky — wide, clear, humidity-free. Just what the doctor ordered. Especially at sunset:

Behold the Seney National Wildlife Refuge. A CCC project. You know, government make-work welfare-state drudgery. Never created a thing of value, ever. Just look at all that nothingness. Wouldn’t a nice theme park look good there?

When it’s not swallowing 700-foot freighters, Lake Superior likes to loaf around on nice summer days, impersonating the Caribbean:

So peaceful, so pleasant. And on that particular day, not even very cold. Wide, blue, placid. And, probably 20 feet out, damn cold. But beautiful.

And that will be the end of the vacation slide show, and much of the vacation narrative. We didn’t do much. We drove over the bridge, saw some old boats and old friends in Hessel, turned west, arrived at the Green Cottage, aka John and Sam’s ancestral family estate (Sam’s, actually), opened “A Storm of Swords” and barely moved for a week. It was a week in literary disappointments. Me, that I did little else but read yet another goddamn George R.R. Martin fantasy epic, got through hundreds and hundreds of pages, in fact, and still have only 70 percent of it under my belt. And now I have to read the rest of the goddamn things, because I’m committed. I have to find out who Jon Snow’s mother was. I have to see what happens when the dragons reach Westeros. Winter is still coming, and I want to get a feeling for it. And if you tell me that after 12 million pages, all those questions are still unanswered, I need to hunt Martin down and shake that extra middle initial out of him.

As for Alan, he fished the Fox River, which you Hemingway fans know is the one in the Nick Adams stories, and yes, I know the author says it’s the Two Hearted, but it’s not. The one you walk to from the train station in Seney is the Fox. But “Two Hearted” is a far more poetic and literary name than Fox, so he switched them, and let’s let that be the end of it, shall we? Anyway, Alan fished the Fox, or one of the branches. It was about as wide as our bathtub, and no deeper. He caught some fish. They were good fish. He turned them all loose.

And it was nice being in that part of the U.P., which is new to me. I like the look of those old farms, those triumphs of hope over experience, as the growing season is short and the soil is poor. About all anyone raises is hay and beef, not even alfalfa, and I don’t know how you keep a herd growing on grass hay, but I guess they do it in the west all the time, don’t they? Sam’s family place — she’s the fourth generation to own it — used to be a pea farm. They grew seed stock for gardeners, and on maps, it’s still called the Pea Farm, even though peas haven’t been grown there in decades. There’s an orchard, and we made applesauce one day with the early-ripening specimens. Everyone up there has a few apple trees, and besides the obvious reasons to grow apples, there’s the one they didn’t teach you in the Johnny Appleseed unit in school — hard cider for long winters.

Because that’s what the U.P. specializes in. However, I’m glad we got there for a week of its very lovely summer. There was a bald eagle roosting on the point over the lakefront (Big Manistique) on Sam’s property. I assume that means we made it all the way to Real America.

So, I’m glad last week’s retreads seem to have gone over well. I was well and truly off the grid, and had difficulty reading them myself, with half-bar service and the dreaded Edge data network. But I did read all the comments, very…slowly. One…by…one. It was a lesson on what constitutes urgent communication. News was that which was covered by NPR, and little else. So I missed the Kardashian nuptials and anything else that was deemed newsworthy by bloggers and the like. Although someone sent me this, about Rick Perry, and that’s pretty amusing. Beyond that, I don’t have much, and it’s Monday. And you know what that means.

It’s good to be back with all you peeps. Let’s see what the rest of August may hold, shall we?

Kate’s pediatrician laid a fact on me the last time we saw her that I’ve been mulling ever since: About 80 percent of Michigan residents suffer from some form of seasonal allergies.

“It’s because of the humidity,” she said, which didn’t make too much sense, but I didn’t challenge her. Not because I’m not a doctor-challenger — the world needs more of those, and I’m happy to do my part — but because I was relieved that she thought that was the cause of Kate’s occasional headaches, and furthermore, that we didn’t need to do any expensive diagnostics to confirm this. Because of the 80 percent thing. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. You get headaches during allergy season, exactly like one of your parents? Eh, you probably have allergies, too. She takes an over-the-counter antihistamine daily, and that takes care of it, for the most part.

The parent who also gets headaches isn’t me. I am apparently in the 20 percent who doesn’t have allergies. Everyone else? When the spring flowers bloom, when the autumn leaves rot, when the summer’s goldenrod sways in the breeze, sending its pollen out to drive 80 percent of you insane, I remain immune. Lucky, lucky me.

I told the pediatrician this. “Wow, I feel really lucky now,” I said. “Because I’ve never been allergic to anything.” She looked at me with that look doctors get when you say things like that.

“Seasonal allergies can present at any time of life,” she said. If this were a movie, that line would be staged like a gypsy curse, with visual effects and maybe a spooky echo.

Because my eyes are burning and itchy. They’ve been that way for days. At first I thought my contacts were inside out. Nope. Sweat running in my eyes? A likely culprit, but I doubt it. Not enough sleep? It’s happening on days when I grabbed close to nine hours the night before. What could be the problem? What?

The other day I was working in the yard and paused to drag the back of my hand across my forehead, which had an immediate effect on my eyeballs. It all came clear: Oh, riiiight.

Granted, it’s possible it was some other plant-based irritant, like oils from one of the weeds I was pulling up. But using the standard layman’s medical diagnostic technique of dividing the first thing that pops into your head by something some guy you know told you once, I feel confident I have now joined the 80 percent. I hope someone else grew out of their own allergies at the same moment, just so we can keep it all even.

At this point I’m glad it’s just the eyes. Because I hate feeling like I have a cold all the time.

Actually, I’ve suspected for some time that I had a mild hops allergy. The first beer of the night used to give me a stuffy nose. I experimented for a while with different brands, but it was one of those things where after a while, I sort of lost the thread of the scientific method. Drinking beer will do that.

Why are the eyes so vulnerable to all of our ills? Is it the watery-goo thing, or the windows-of-the-soul factor? Last night, I was doing some reporting for an assignment I’m working on for a magazine. I was in the midst of a crowd of drug addicts, all 12-stepping it, and I was sitting there letting the impressions accumulate — the smell of cigarettes, that rode-hard-and-put-up-wet look so many of these folks have, even in sobriety. I caught the eye of one of them. Like that guy, I thought. He looks like he’s still stoned. Bad eyes on that one. A few minutes later, the leader of the meeting singled him out.

“Get out of here,” he ordered. “Don’t come here to nod. Dirty on benzos, you are.” A subsequent urine test confirmed it. Huh.

Boy, you can tell it’s August, can’t you?

On to the bloggage!

There’s something about that ReasonTV badge on the microphone that makes Matt Damon’s smackdown of this twit so much sweeter.

Mittens Romney, Mr. Maturity. Right.

For you Game of Thrones fans, an effects reel from the house that did all those amazing painted backdrops. And to think David Benioff said the hardest thing about that project was working with horses.

With that, I think I’m off to eat a late breakfast. Happy Tuesday, all. I hope the heat wave is breaking.

Sorry. I thought I published this two hours ago. Is my face red.

Two of the most charming letters I got as a newspaper columnist in Indiana were in response to something I wrote about my ignorance of agriculture in general, and the farm economy in particular. That was many years ago, and I’m not as green (ha) as I once was, but it always appalled me that most people can discuss crap like Hollywood box-office figures, but don’t know how their food is produced, or what a pork belly is.

The letters were about corn detasseling, and detailed the particular misery of this rural job, which is traditionally done by teenagers in that shadowland of the early teens, when they’re physically able to work but unable to get hired by most employers. And corn detasseling — the laborious removal of the pollinating part of the plant — is work in the truest sense of the word, a day spent reaching and snipping and sneezing and suffering for $8 an hour. It’s only exploitative if you consider any manual labor so, because the kids do it willingly and $8 an hour, while not a king’s ransom, is good money for a 14-year-old, working steadily. Kids can make a thousand bucks in a season.

One of the letters came with helpful diagrams and cartoon drawings of the writer, wearing wet blue jeans.

Anyway, I mention all this because of this story I saw in today’s Wall Street Journal, about the death of two girls on a detasseling crew, electrocuted when they touched irrigation equipment that had been electrified by a recent lightning strike. Very sad, but for those of you who know nothing about it, a useful reminder of what goes into the agri-economy:

Early-morning fields are typically covered with dew, and frequently muddy from rain, so workers are wet all morning. Then, as the July sun rises higher, the fields begin to steam and the workers are soaked with sweat all afternoon. The work—reaching up to stalks between five and eight feet high while walking through uneven dirt for ten miles—is exhausting.

…Although the childhood injury rate on farms fell 59% from 1998 to 2009, according to the National Farm Medicine Center in Marshfield, Wis., agriculture still generates the second-highest fatality rate among youth workers, and a fatality rate that is nearly six times the average across all industries. Last summer, two teenage boys died in a grain-bin accident 50 miles north of Sterling in Mt. Carroll.

And that, friends, is how you make hybrid seeds. The hard way. (Oh, and while we city slickers may pronounce that particular part of the corn plant to rhyme with “hassle,” both my correspondents pointed out that the people who do it say “tossle.”)

Speaking of manual labor, I see in the comments from yesterday, Basset and Dexter are discussing Ben Hamper, whose column, “I, Rivethead,” briefly ran in Mother Jones magazine when Michael Moore was briefly editing it in the ’80s. Funny they should bring it up, as I kept one of those columns — the one about Bruce Springsteen, faux working-class hero — in my “Great Moments” file for years. Great Moments was the collection of good writing I kept to page through in moments of boredom or down time, or when I was truly strapped for inspiration. A lot of people have made a lot of accurate observations and charges about Michael Moore over the years, about his willingness to bend the truth or substitute his own bullshit for someone else’s, and about his own faux working-class hero act, but whatever help he gave Hamper, a true working-class voice, will absolutely go on the credit side of the karma ledger. I always thought it was amusing that Moore flamed out at that bastion of lefty preening, Ma Jones, so quickly. I’m sure he was a jerk to work with, and I’m sure they had good reasons to give him the hook. But I still recall Hamper’s withering takedown of Springsteen, how in about 800 words he brought me closer to factory life than any mournful tune about closin’ refineries by you-know-who.

And I especially remember his simple observation that if you stand at the entrance of any auto plant, anywhere, and look around, you will see a bar, maybe two. Ever since, whenever I pass a plant, I look for the bar, and he’s right — it’s never far away. Elmore Leonard had an amusing passage in one of his books about the stop-off, as essential to a line worker’s end-of-shift ritual as the shower. There was a story in one of the papers here a while back, where someone observed that GM actually tried to buy one of those bars to close it down, and the owner wouldn’t sell. Owning bars that cater to certain communities — gay men, blue-collar workers — is like owning a gold mine.

That used to be true of newspapers, too, but not so much anymore. As one of my editors mourned, upon coming home from a conference, “I used to play poker half the night at these things. Now everybody gets up early and goes jogging together.”

Sigh.

OK, the day — and FINANCIAL DISASTER FOR THE ENTIRE COUNTRY — awaits, and a big one it is. Lunch downtown, then yet another concert with Kate, this one with the meet-and-greet. Yes, I am insisting on a picture with the band. I paid my money, too.

Bloggage? Too tired to look at the moment. Post your own, if you’re so inclined. I’ll be back after the weekend, or maybe from Saturday at the market.

The other day I was riding my bike to the library, a trip of less than a mile, brevity I was grateful for, as it was approximately 450 degrees outside. I was thinking how cold the spring had been, and oh well, Michigan, what are you gonna do, and then I saw this dead squirrel on the sidewalk ahead, splayed. This was in a park.

“Wow, that squirrel died looking just like a pelt. Weird.”

I came closer. The tail twitched, and the dead squirrel jumped up and scampered to safety. It reminded me I’d seen this once before, on a similarly hot day. The squirrel was lying on a picnic table. Every dog I’ve had has sought out cool surfaces to press their bellies on; Spriggy had a tile hearth spot he liked, our old German shepherd Agnes preferred the foyer. So I guess it’s not so strange, and even though I’d gone through my entire life without seeing it until recently, animals do adapt. I did make note that all the ones I’ve seen doing it are the black-coated ones we have around here, who anecdotally seem smarter and more aggressive than their gray cousins.

Then my old neighbor in Fort Wayne, Earl Bowley, posted this on his Facebook. Taken at a local restaurant on, yes, a hot day:

Planking squirrels. What will they think of next?

Its name is Walter, I’m told. Now you know.

Rained all night here, and at the moment all I really want to do is stare out at the puddles, drinking coffee. It’s been so blazing hot of late, the sun so relentless, that it’s nice to raise the blinds for a change and dig it. Or as a certain Seattle-bred left-handed guitar god sang, lay back and groove on a rainy day. (Hendrix must have done little else, in Seattle.) However, we’re promised a 90-degree day once the low pressure moves through, so my guess is, the primary activity of the day will not be grooving, but sweating.

A couple of book notes: I’m working my way through the nightstand selection, “Punching Out: One Year in the Life of a Closing Auto Plant,” and enjoying it very much. Recommended for those of you who’d like to discuss the auto industry, or even the manufacturing economy, with anything other than bumper-sticker phrases. (“The UAW killed GM, really, it’s very simple.” And so on.) The overwhelming impression I get is that building cars and everything large made of metal is anything but, and I stand in awe of the people who do. “Punching Out” is the story of the disassembly of Budd Wheel, a major stamping plant a few miles from my house, which closed for good in 2006. The plant’s equipment was then cut apart and sold, piece by piece and press by press, to companies which then shipped all these items to places like Mexico and India and so forth, for reassembly at other plants, where the evolution of the economy hasn’t quite caught up with ours. Which is to say, where there’s still a growing need for factories and workers.

The author, Paul Clemens, wrote a short version of this for the NYT op-ed page some years back, and I linked to it then. The idea of scrapping, from the illegal street to the respectable factory level, is a pervasive theme in Detroit, and has been for a while. When Kate was still in Brownies, we took a tour of the Ford estate in Grosse Pointe Shores, where Edsel and Eleanor, son and daughter-in-law of Henry, built their Cotswold mansion. The guide pointed out all the details that had been taken from great houses in the real Cotswolds — flooring from this one, windows from that — and I had to smile. Sometimes it seems there’s a finite amount of wealth in the world, and all it does is travel the globe, being bought and sold by those with the means and the need to do so. It’s not that Detroit is a ruin; it’s that its wealth has been taken elsewhere, leaving, in Clemens’ memorable phrase, the working class mopping up after itself.

I sound like a commie, don’t I? Well, I’m just thinking out loud, watching the puddles dimple.

The hour, it grows late. Let’s jump to bloggage, shall we?

“Bridge & Tunnel,” the “Jersey Shore” that wasn’t. A good read from the Village Voice about kids these days, on Staten Island.

I love these things, known on the ‘nets as supercuts: A montage of movie pep-talk-in-the-mirror scenes. Language NSFW.

Tea Party douche who lectures the president on financial responsibility, sued by his ex-wife for $100K in back child support.

House-cleanin’, verb-studyin’, other writin’ awaits the day. Enjoy yours.

Sorry I’m late today. Tuesdays are nearly as crazed as Mondays, but today wasn’t so bad, as I got to edit an intern’s story about the school board meeting last night, one of the last he’ll do for GrossePointeToday.com, and damn if he didn’t show noticeable improvement over the course of the summer. I can’t work with my interns in a traditional newsroom, where they could watch me work on their stories, observe staff interactions and generally learn the ways of the tribe. I have to handle them via email, phone calls and text messages, only occasionally face-to-face, and that’s a hard way to teach. But check it, the kid hit this one out of the park:

The bad blood continued to boil Monday night (July 25) as the Grosse Pointe school board’s schism widened in the wake of the superintendent search, this time over staffing cuts and the controversial Head Start program for Poupard Elementary.

No chairs were kicked this time, but there was name-calling and accusations. Board member Fred Minturn called president John Steininger a “bully,” while Steininger called out Minturn on missing more votes than any other board member. Steininger turned red in the face while talking about Head Start, as did Minturn. A meeting with a routine agenda ran past 11 p.m., with a full house watching every thrust and parry.

OK, I added “thrust and parry.” He said they watched with “shock and awe.” The fencing term is twee, but meh, it’s better than the other, if only marginally.

Who knows what a parry is? I took a few fencing classes, so I do: It’s the deflection of a blow, particularly in sword fighting. (I always scored the first point in my matches, because I came out after en garde with a quick poke to the chest. My parrying skills lagged, however.) Here’s another term I looked up recently: flotsam and jetsam. I know what it means — trash, basically — but why do they always go together like that? It has to do with maritime law. Flotsam is floating debris of a shipwreck, and is distinguished from jetsam, which describes that which was intentionally thrown overboard, or jettisoned, frequently in times of distress. I guess the distinction comes in when a court is sorting out claims on wreckage of value. But when it’s all afloat around the site of a sunken ship, it’s pretty hard to tell apart, so the words go together.

And that has been your dose of Arcane English Usage with Nance, for this Tuesday. I should have a show on public radio.

OK, Oslo. Let’s talk Oslo. Or rather, let’s talk after-Oslo. I’m going to refrain from piling on Jennifer Rubin, as richly as she deserves it. If you write a column, or a blog, sooner or later this will happen to you, unless you are an extraordinarily careful person, and if you are, you likely don’t have a column or blog (at least not one supported by someone else, that you get paid to write). It’s happened to me, and it’ll probably happen again. The internet wants immediate reaction and analysis, and if you provide it, sooner or later reality will bollix up your hastily jumped-to conclusions. Besides, Stephen Colbert took care of her last night, and that’s a place — at the end of Colbert’s sword — I wouldn’t wish on anyone. So I’ll give her a pass out of sisterhood, and instead make a few random observations:

Some are calling this guy a Norwegian Tim McVeigh, and that sounds about right. Also, he seems to be quite the autodidact, and named several American writers and websites that he found to be really on the beam, including Pamela Geller’s batty belfry, Atlas Shrugged, among others. It reminds me of the time, many years ago, when the talk-radio station I dabbled at (can’t really call it “work”) used to run an overnight show by some lunatic who raved about the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rothschilds, the Federal Reserve — you know the type. I didn’t hear this call I’m about to describe, but my partner Mark did: One night a guy called and, with chilling certainty, told the host he was on his way to Washington to get things done on that front. He said he was carrying the right tools for the job, if you catch his drift, etc. The host, suddenly confronted with apparent evidence that someone out there was taking his carnival act seriously, started buh-buh-buhing, stammering and trying to keep two far-apart plates spinning — the one that contended every word out of his mouth, about stopping these bastards before they take the country down, was God’s honest truth; and the one that said this isn’t the way to do it, which ran counter to his fiery rhetoric about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, etc. Mark, who keeps a sardonic twinkle in his eye most of the time, thought this was quite the entertainment. I don’t know how the call ended, but no one was assassinated in Washington that week, so I guess the caller changed his mind.

Anyway, when that happens — when a crazy person has taken your rhetoric and run with it — it seems that responding is a delicate matter. How not to do it: Sarah Palin’s poor-me act after Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting in April, Geller’s shrieking. How to do it: Bruce Bawer in the Wall Street Journal, who writes:

It is chilling to think that blog entries that I composed in my home in west Oslo over the past couple of years were being read and copied out by this future mass-murderer in his home in west Oslo. …In Norway, to speak negatively about any aspect of the Muslim faith has always been a touchy matter, inviting charges of “Islamophobia” and racism. It will, I fear, be a great deal more difficult to broach these issues now that this murderous madman has become the poster boy for the criticism of Islam.

Good to know.

I said yesterday I was hoarding links. Many have already been posted in comments, but lots of you don’t read those, so apologies if some of them are old to you. In no particular order:

Via Moe and Cooz, Charles Pierce in Esquire on the bomb that didn’t go off. A great, worrisome read.

Another great read, from Michael Kruse at the St. Petersburg Times, one of the last papers that does this sort of thing: How a woman can disappear in plain sight. Not news for anyone with mental illness in their family, but worth your time.

Neil Steinberg posted this on his Facebook yesterday, an oldie from 1997, but still fresh, as a case study in corporate cluelessness, the tale of how Quaker Oats wrecked Snapple. (Remember the Snapple lady, who read customer letters in commercials? She was fired by Quaker. Their “beverage consultant” told the company, “Not everyone in the country starts the morning with a bagel.” Gee, I wonder what that meant.)

A truly spectacular newspaper-correction story.

One of the best Tom & Lorenzo posts ever, on Cathy Cambridge’s wedding gown.

Finally, worth a complete click-through: The insides of refrigerators, a photo essay. Includes one from Fort Wayne, but no clue who it might be.

And that is it, and that is all, and this is me, getting back to real work.

Nothing like a trip to Warped to make you fear for the future of your country. Hey, you — yeah, you with the one-inch ear grommet. (I’m told they’re called “gauges.”) Now that your passion for individual self-expression has tipped over into self-mutilation, what with the Ubangi earlobe and neck tattoos, are you aware that you’ve now entered the shadowlands of the economy, that no one will hire you for anything more than hawking CDs of bands that will never get a major-label record contract? Maybe you’ll get beamed up to roadie someday, and you can pick up the girls the band rejects. Motorcycle maintenance — there’s another career path, if you have the skills. Or you could be the next Cat Whisperer, although you should note he has not done that thing with his ears, and if he wore a long-sleeved shirt and gave up on the stupid facial hair, he’d look relatively normal. You, however…

Oh, and you over there — yes, you, the sweet, lovely 18-year-old, although you look younger, hon. I’m assuming you’re 18 because you too have self-expressed through permanently inking parts of your body that will be revealed in standard white-collar office garb. It’s possible you are younger, though, and did this to yourself with a fake ID or even parental approval. Someday you’re going to get tired of working at Costco and want a leg up, maybe into a spot as a dental hygienist or LPN. Dentists are professionals, and like professional office staff; do you really want to spend the rest of your life dabbing concealer on that stupid butterfly under your earlobe? Tell me the story behind that one. Oh, you got it because a butterfly represents transformation, and you used to be really shy, but then you met Kenny and he brought you out of your shell — sorry, your pupae stage — so you thought you’d demonstrate your love and devotion by making it permanent. And then he left, but hey, it’s not like you put his name there or anything. Butterflies are pretty. Stupid dentists.

(Pause.)

Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just spinning conversations with the air. It’s entirely possible this generation will march boldly into the future and seize it with both hands, and that one day the cover of Fortune magazine will feature a CEO with a net worth of $20 billion and a giant grommet in his ear, and that my teeth will be cleaned someday by a hygienist — nay, my dentures fitted by a dentist — with an inky sleeve depicting the battle of Armageddon, enacted by anthropomorphic toothbrushes. And no one will think anything of it.

And maybe monkeys will fly out my butt. Just watch.

Back from Cleveland in the nick of time for the heat to find another gear of misery. Today’s expected high: 100 degrees. Today’s expected cloud cover: 0. Percentage of today I will spend in the great outdoors: Not bloody much. But I’m glad I went, both for the midweek break and the chance to see some things I haven’t seen before, and meet the wonderful Michael Heaton, who led us to a great bar just west of downtown, the Parkview, where I was introduced to deep-fried asparagus. We were to meet him on the street out front and follow him there, so I said, “What kind of car do you drive?”

“A red convertible,” he replied.

Expecting a Mustang, or something worthy of a blogger who calls himself the Minister of Culture and the brother of a famous Hollywood actress, I was nonetheless taken aback when a Chevy Cavalier with deer damage pulled alongside. Oh, well — he is a journalist, after all.

More on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame later. One last word about Warped:

I won’t apologize for enjoying the parents’ tent as much as I did — the air-conditioning, while not terribly effective, was a pleasant break, and the ice-cold water a wonderful treat. I read “A Clash of Kings” on my iPad and watched other parents — the woman who alternated between Virginia Woolf on her Kindle and mad texting on her phone, another who went through two issues of the Chronicle of Higher Education before turning to “American Psycho.” Reverse Daycare was staffed by a cute girl of Indian bloodlines who, I decided, must be a student of the hard sciences at the higher-ed level — she was self-assured among her sweaty elders, and her tattoo was small, on her shoulder blade, and depicted the DNA molecule.

But I did get out every couple hours or so, to walk around until I wilted and listen to some music. The music was? Loud. The sights were? Arresting (and I’m sorry, I can’t get this photo to rotate):

(You wonder how I handle these moments as a parent? Teachable!)

Now, off to catch up on a few days’ of put-off work. Stay cool, all.