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.

Is the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame worth a visit? Yes. (More on that in a few days.) Things I didn’t expect to hear, however:

Kate (in the gift shop): “I wish I could afford vinyl.”

Me: “What? Of course you can afford vinyl. How much could it be?”

Oh:

I can’t let fishfly season go by without at least one photo documentation:

That’s from a few days ago, the typical leavings of a single night. They’re pretty much done now, but they had one last hurrah last weekend, when the Detroit Symphony Orchestra was playing on the shores of Lake St. Clair. It was a two-night gig. The first night they played the first half of the program and took intermission while night fell and the hatch came. Within minutes, the insects covered the players’ music — they’re attracted to anything white — and, it’s safe to say, were probably arousing a wide gamut of emotions among them, as well as the audience. The following night they dropped the intermission and shortened the program, so as to get everything wrapped before the disaster movie started.

Stupid goddamn Mondays. I worked, on something, all damn weekend. Except for Saturday night, when we went to the Concert of Colors down at the orchestra hall for the Don Was All-Star Detroit Revue. It wasn’t bad, and if it skewed old, well, that was the audience. Martha Reeves was the finale, still workin’ it after all these years. Her voice is shot, but she was able to shake it on down for “Dancin’ in the Street,” helped along by a vigorous horn section and the love of the crowd. They rolled out a cake for her 70th birthday, happening that very night, and she didn’t look entirely thrilled about it. Kate came with us, which I thought was game of her. I am shlepping her to Cleveland on Tuesday for the Warped Tour, so she owes me one.

Warped will not be held in an air-conditioned orchestra hall, either. In fact, the forecast for the rest of the week is for temps in the 90s. Groan.

So as I must away, a brief bit of bloggage and we’ll try to do better tomorrow.

Why there are more typos in books. Duh:

Editors I spoke to confirmed my guesses. Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of fulltime copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.

I have an RSS feed that picks up every mention of Grosse Pointe on Twitter, excluding “Grosse Pointe Blank,” a cult movie that will live forever in film geekdom. It blew up overnight with a story in the Detroit News, about our school district’s rejection of a Head Start program at one elementary. But all the tweets were from automated feeds aimed at stock traders. I couldn’t figure out why, until I remembered the elementary principal’s name — Penny Stocks. A useful reminder how much of what we now rely on to tell us what people want to know is run by robots.

I was in a grumpy mood pretty much all day yesterday. Would have happily gone 15 rounds with anybody over anything, but I confined it to one nasty email. It started when the lawn service showed up at one next-door neighbor’s house, followed by the carpet cleaner on the other. We finally get a couple of perfect summer days, the sorts of days when you glory in the breeze blowing through the open windows, and then you have to close them all BECAUSE YOU CAN’T HEAR YOURSELF FUCKING THINK.

The worst of the noise was over in an hour. Still. And guess who just showed up five minutes ago? The lawn treatment service, which squirts their potions from a truck-loaded tank, powered by a generator. Just slammed the windows shut again. Get outta my way.

But because I was grumpy, I can totally see why the comment thread on this TPM story about the end of the Minnesota government shutdown immediately fixated on a typo/usage error in the first graf:

Lawmakers on Thursday evening announced they had reached an budget agreement to end the shutdown.

For my money, that’s a typo. Someone wrote “an agreement on the budget” and an editor changed it to “an budget agreement” but forgot to make the a/an change. Someone carped. Someone else responded, and lo, we got ourselves a convoy:

…agreement is between the indefinite article and the NOUN – not the ADJECTIVE. I know is sounds odd, but it is definitely correct. 😀 (remove the word ‘budget’ to see my point). I know we were all taught that one went by the initial vowel sound of the adjective (whether an actual vowel or a soft ‘h’ sound, as in ‘historian’) – but this usage has come to be accepted as well.

The hell you say. After a few people piled on saying the same thing, the original offender doubled down:

Modern usage references ALL agree on the usage rule that I gave you. It may not ‘sound’ good to you – or to me – but it is accepted and used throughout the professional publishing world. And being a published author myself, as well as a historian who reads upwards of 12 professional journals a month, I can assure you that the ‘vowel sound of the adjective’ rule has been dead for a good 20 years now.

Oh, bullshit, and don’t pull that “published author” crapola on me. If it appears in “professional journals,” it’s because those things are, first, written by professionals in every field except writing, and lightly edited, if at all, by grad students working for peanuts, who concentrate on headlines and cutlines and don’t give a shit about a/an agreement. I’m so glad these arguments take place on the internet, because if I’d read it yesterday in the frame of mind I was in, I’d have smashed a beer bottle on a table and started waving the broken neck around.

I’ll bet $50 this guy is an engineer. They know everything. True story: Guy I know was trying to teach another guy I know how to pilot his — the second guy’s — brand-new boat. First guy said: “It would be unwise to drive the boat there, because even though the water looks just like the water in the middle of the lake? Frequently at the end of a natural point of land, there will be shallow water stretching for some distance beyond it. It’s called a shoal, and–”

“I’m an engineer, I know what I’m doing.”

(muffled thump belowdecks)

Well, I’m a writer, Mr. Published Author, and I say it’s either “a budget agreement” or “an agreement on the budget,” and I say the hell with it. Two dozen comments later, they finally got around to discussing it — the budget agreement — on the thread.

The lawn-treatment guys are gone now. I feel much better.

I’ve been thinking about this topic a bit lately — the true weight of comments left on the internet. The old rule of thumb in newsrooms is that every phone call equals 10 readers, and every letter, 100 — or something like that. If you get a few phone calls about something you’ve published, it’s probably no biggie. If you get a pile of letters, it is. I’m starting to wonder, however, if comments left on Facebook and other websites actually go in the opposite direction, if they might equal a fraction of a person who cares. Let’s call this unit a “shit,” as in the phrase “give a shit.” One phone call = 10 shits given, one letter = 100 shits given, one web comment = .3 of a shit given. Some people seem to have little else to do.

Which seems as good a time as any to go bloggage-ing.

You remember Saul Steinberg’s famous map of the U.S. for the cover of the New Yorker? An updated version of the same idea. My favorite is the driving distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

It’s not opening until August, but “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is already on heavy TV-commercial rotation, and I totally want to see it. The trailer makes me laff ‘n’ laff. Go, monkeys!

And thanks to Coozledad for finding this.

Finally, remember Velvet Goldmine’s daughter Phoebe, and how y’all chipped in to send her to summer leadership camp at Yale? Guess where she is:

You all are good people. And Phoebe’s dad looks exactly like his brother, whom some of you may know as Mr. Lance Mannion.

OK, a long-awaited weekend is nearly here. So I’m off to join it.

Too much weekend for me, which is not to say I partied too hard or ate like a Roman, only that the weekend’s weekending pushed the work I usually do on the weekend off to the side, which means… you get the idea. It’s going to be a long one, so today is a write-off, blog-wise.

And what did we do this weekend? Traveled back across the Mitten to pick up Kate from camp. We needed to be there too early to work an early-morning departure, so we spent the night in Grand Rapids. There’s something about the phrase “a night in Grand Rapids” that says, “Screw the cost! Let’s splurge!” and so we stayed at the Amway Grand Hotel, the finest lodgings to be had in Dutch west Michigan, or so we’re led to believe from the brochures.

I practiced the phrase, “I’m at the Amway” in my head a few dozen times, but could never escape that little frisson that millions feel with any mention of the name. Amway may have done for Grand Rapids what Eli Lilly has done for Indianapolis, what General Motors did for Detroit, what any (large corporation) has done for (name of city). So I guess people get a different feeling there, but for me, the word will always be attached to those phone calls you get from a friend, sorta — you know, that guy you used to party with, but he was really more Paul’s friend than yours, even though he gave you a ride that one time. Anyway, he called the other night, and asked to come over, and you said OK, although your spidey-sense was already a-tingle. And then he shows up, sits down, accepts a beer and immediately asks, “How would you like to join an organization that can make all your financial dreams come true?” And at that moment, you want to stick an icepick in your ear and end it all, because oh God, it’s the Amway pitch.

I’m no fan of Jennifer Granholm, and went into the 2006 gubernatorial race with my eyes and mind open. The first time I saw the Republican nominee and Amway scion Dick DeVos in action, was at a town-hall meet-the-voters thing on TV. A woman rose and asked how she was to stay in Michigan, with her family’s third-generation plumbing-supply business in such dire straits with the weak economy. (And this would be before the bad stuff started; I assume they’re long-gone by now.) What were these candidates offering her? Jenny gave some canned answer, and then DeVos turned to her, crinkled his salesman eyes, and said, “I grew up in a family business too, Laurie.” I yodeled an expletive at the TV, snapped it off and resigned myself to four more years of Granholm.

Anyway, Dick Jr., the unsuccessful would-be governor, is the mirror image of his dad, whose kingly portrait hangs in the lobby, along with that of his partner, Jay Van Andel:

Terrible picture, and I apologize, but the light was all wrong.

Anyway, I’ll have more tomorrow. In the meantime, tell your own Amway story, if you have one.

At every some point on a long drive, the radio fades, you’re tired of whatever you brought to amuse you via the iPod, the old CD you didn’t know was in the car (“Let it Bleed”) has been played twice, and then you turn to your inner resources.

(Five years ago or so, I instituted a summer reading requirement for Kate. For this, she was teased relentlessly by some pinhead little brat from around the way. I overheard Kate defending herself one day: “My mom wants me to have inner resources!” she protested. Can’t say that it worked, down the road. The adjustment to camp that flipped her out the most? Giving up her phone and iPod for TEN WHOLE DAYS.)

It would also seem you also start writing in the second person. Let’s stop that.

Anyway, I was deep in a reverie about something, perhaps related to “Let it Bleed,” when I moved into the orbit of another driver. I was traveling 75, on cruise control. He was traveling 73. I came up behind him to pass on the left. He didn’t move. I gave him a minute or two. He didn’t move. So I went around him on the right.

I HATE doing that. I’m told it’s legal in Michigan to pass on the right if there’s another escape option for the passed driver — basically, if they’re in the center lane of a multi-lane freeway. Most of the freeways around here are like that, so everyone does it, and assumes it’s just legal, period. Certainly the police don’t seem to enforce it. Even after six years, it still freaks me out, and I still hate it. People need to be aware of their speed relative to the flow of traffic, and adjust their lane accordingly. You know, the way I do. Needless to say, the world isn’t perfect, and all our automotive technology serves to do in the grand scheme of things is insulate a driver better from the road around him or her. (A few years ago, a toddler in Detroit died when her neck was caught between the back-seat window and its frame, a confusing and tragic turn of events that raised more questions than any account of it ever answered. It took long minutes for her to suffocate, during which her grandmother — seated, what, 18 inches away? — failed to notice the child was in distress. In what may be the world’s only instance of a useful, clarifying comment left on a newspaper website, a woman who claimed to have witnessed the incident said the driver was listening to recordings of a charismatic preacher at an ear-splitting volume, which continued to play as she finally got a clue and stopped, and the scene descended into chaos. What a fucking surreal sight that must have been.)

Anyway, I passed him. Two minutes later, he passed me on the left, going downhill. Then resumed going two miles per hour slower, still in the left lane.

Options: Speed up to 80, leave him in the dust, put a wide berth between Mr. Left Lane and myself. Or hold my course and speed and growl a little. Guess which one I chose? Do you think I’m an angry person?

I once drove from Fort Wayne to Philadelphia with a co-worker who hated the right lane. “I’m afraid I’m going to hit the guardrail,” she said. I pointed out that we were driving my Honda CRX, a two-seater the approximate size of a roller skate, and that we could put another one abreast of us in the same lane and still not even come close to the guardrail. I mentioned the rules of the road, and safety. This took about the first 30 minutes of her driving leg, and none of it worked. “I guess it’s just one of my quirks,” she said, as drivers passed on the right, throwing furious scowls at us, every one of which was felt by me, the passenger. I tried to perfect an expression that said, “Sorry, but she’s got this phobia; what can you do?” It mixed a half-inch shrug with a demi-eye roll, and wasn’t particularly successful. The next time we stopped for gas, I took the wheel, and did most of the driving thereafter.

Mr. Left Lane passed me again when I had to cancel the cruise for a knot of slower trucks. The hue of his skin and the little Mexican flag he had dangling from the rear-view suggested that perhaps he learned to drive in another nation. Well. That explains everything, doesn’t it, Left-Lane Ortega? Your formative years were spent motoring in Mexico City, and you don’t know that on a wide, well-maintained American freeway, you DO NOT CRUISE IN THE LEFT LANE. THE LEFT LANE IS FOR PASSING. Didn’t anyone teach you that? I thought for a while about the crowded world cities I’ve been in (not many), and how crazy the traffic was. Coming into Buenos Aires from the airport in 2003, the driver of our van took us down the Avenida 9 de Julio, 9 de Julio being Argentina’s independence day but there’s also about that many lanes going in each direction. Wikipedia says seven. I say bullshit. There appeared to be at least 20. Driving it was colorful enough, but crossing as a pedestrian was insane. The light changed, and if you sprinted, you could make it to the median before waiting out another cycle to cross the 20 lanes on the other side. I imagine, if you were driving there, or someplace like it, you wouldn’t pick up the usual courtesies about lane usage.

Another memory from 2003: A fellow Fellow at U of M called her cell and retrieved a voice mail from a friend in Cairo, saying, “We miss you.” To end the message, her friend held his phone up to the traffic noise for a full minute. It made her laugh, and she played it for a fellow Middle East traveler. “Nothing like it,” he said. “Just one long honk, all the time.”

I was considering all this, then surfaced to look for Left-Lane Ortega. Nowhere in sight. He’d exited while I was constructing this elaborate narrative about his sub-par driving skills. And I hadn’t noticed. Oh, well.

Shortly thereafter, it was time to catch my own exit and deposit Kate at camp. I left her in the rehearsal space, where she had to audition for the grand sorting of skills. All around were kids honking saxes and trumpets, her fellow jazzbos. And that was the last I’ll see her until a week from Sunday, although I hope she’ll write.

And it seems I’ve run out of time with this ridiculous run-on blog entry. Eleven hundred words about driving? Who am I, James Lileks?

Just one bit of bloggage:

A new book, a “cultural history of shoplifting,” which interests me because it’s one crime I never, ever indulged in. Nothing is more chickenshit than thievery, in my opinion, but your mileage may vary.

Have a great weekend, all. It’s already in progress, here.

In recent years, the influx of red-winged blackbirds to our area has prompted some non-official but civic-minded soul to post signs along the heavily used lakefront sidewalk. The birds defend their nests aggressively, and joggers and pedestrians were getting head-pecked. They nest near our lake cottage, and I know they prefer a water view, preferably a swamp, so I wasn’t thinking about head protection when I rode my bicycle down Mack Avenue, a business strip about a mile from any water, or even a backyard water fountain.

Fortunately, I was wearing some anyway. It’s a strange feeling, a bird attack — the bonk isn’t much, especially through a styrofoam-lined plastic hat — but the accompanying aggression call and the wings flapping so close to your eyes summon up a deep lizard-brain response. I’ve known two people in my life who have an unreasonable fear of birds, and for the first time, I understand why. The little fuckers are what’s left of dinosaurs, after all.

If you have red-winged blackbirds in your neighborhood, beware. They don’t play.

So. I recently bookmarked the Daily Beast. Again. In my old age, I’m becoming very stingy with bookmarks, and if your site doesn’t deliver, I’m totally out of there. But they keep hiring good people, and occasionally publishing something worth reading, and I keep thinking they’re worth a daily visit, and then, today, I read something like this:

Headline: Clooney Breakup’s Red Flags. Subhed: Fans thought she’d get him to the altar, but Barbie Nadeau says the flameout of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor and his showgirl squeeze started months ago.

Really? Fans thought that? I’m a George Clooney fan, and how well I recall those days of …sometime in the last couple of years, when I would call my fellow Clooneyheads and say, “You know, I think this is the One. I think she’ll get him to the altar.” And we were so astounded when they broke up that I’m now going to read this piece, in the authoritative voice of Barbie Nadeau, who was scanning the heavens for warning signs of this flameout. She saw it coming months ago. And so:

The 50-year-old graying stallion announced that he and his 32-year-old Italian showgirl have called their fairytale romance quits.

One sentence — not even a compound one — and three clichés/tropes. A graying stallion, a showgirl, and a fairytale romance. I can’t count the times I read Kate bedtime stories about middle-aged actors, Italian beauties of indeterminate careers and how they fell in love for a year or so.

Sad as it may be, it’s fair to say that “Cloonalis” was probably doomed from the start.

I’m totally sad about Cloonalis.

Since they first fell into each others’ arms in 2009, there’s been much speculation that perhaps Canalis was the siren who could finally wrestle America’s most eligible bachelor to the altar. The two seemed inseparable, and Clooney had passed several coupledom milestones with Canalis, like vacationing with her parents and bonding with her girlfriends. They had been effectively joined at the hip from the beaches of Mexico to the red carpets of the Kodak Theater for two full years. He stood by her side when she was questioned about her role in a prostitution ring in Milan, and she accompanied him to the Emmys when he won the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award.

I love these details, presented with a straight face. He stood by her side when she was questioned about her role in a prostitution ring. I remember when Alan and I passed that coupledom milestone, too.

But it doesn’t take more than a glance through the recent tabloids to see a number of red flags foreshadowing this breakup.

Oh, do we really need to do this? The Daily Beast, deleted.

Which seems as good a time as any to skip to the bloggage. First, a twofer from two of our favorite WashPost writers, not necessarily in the WashPost. Gene Weingarten’s reply to a journalism grad student who asked him how he’d built his personal brand over the years:

The best way to build a brand is to take a three-foot length of malleable iron and get one end red-hot. Then, apply it vigorously to the buttocks of the instructor who gave you this question. You want a nice, meaty sizzle.

She’ll get an A on her project and probably miss the point entirely.

Hank Stuever in the Stranger, the Seattle alt-weekly, for its annual Pride Week-pegged gay issue. The theme — You’re doing it wrong — inspired his essay on “Glee,” which says everything that needs to be said:

If Glee was in touch with the reality of being gay—which can have its dark side—it would make the cruelly honest decision to switch off the Auto-Tune and razzle-dazzle and show a bunch of kids in a choir room singing badly but believing they’re great.

I didn’t hate this show immediately, but I soured early on, although I stuck through season one. (If nothing else, Rachel Berry’s “Don’t Rain on My Parade” was worth the trip.) I gather that in season two, it devolved into Very Special Episode territory almost immediately, which might mark a new record in the trip from smart-and-hip to dumb-and-predictable. Kate’s 8th-grade choir did “Don’t Stop Believin'” for their spring concert this year, which makes the circle complete — now “Glee” influences show choirs, instead of the other way around. (The crowd started to cheer when they heard the now-familiar choir arrangement, which made me want to stab everyone in the throat.) Anyway, worth a read.

Newspaper columnists like to write personal essays they think readers will find warm and funny, but they should all just give it up, because they’ll never be as good as the best personal essay-writin’ bloggers. That is all. EDIT: For some reason, this link isn’t working at the moment. Hope for a revival when their server comes back up — or whatever the problem is, gets fixed.

And that is all. Happy weekend. I’m off to see Matt & Kim tonight at the Majestic.

From the people who brought you the $400 vacuum cleaner, behold the $450 fan:

Yes, it’s the Dyson “air multiplier.” Saw these in a Best Buy the other day, and to be sure, $450 is the price only for the two on the right. The little one on the left is a steal at $300. They were putting out a lot of air, I’ll give ’em that. What makes them worth a price like that? Why, they have no blades. What’s wrong with blades? “Buffeting” — it says right there on the display. No blades, no buffeting.

Of all the things to dislike about room fans, buffeting never occurred to me. Dust on the blades, yes, about a million other things, but not buffeting. Anyway, for $450, you can buy an air conditioner, although the Dyson Air Multiplier is certainly more stylish. I like that blue. I hate to go off on yet another reverie of nostalgia here, but thinking about fans makes me think of a few times in the past when they were significant factors in my quality of life. They were not times when I could afford $450 for air multiplication. My first term at college was a summer session; I left for Athens one week after high-school graduation, and landed in the middle of the steamiest, hottest summer in southeast Ohio in many years. No AC in the dorms, only two of which were open for the small residential community — one for men, one for women. A fan was an absolute necessity, and there was something wonderful about turning it on in the evenings, leaving the room for a while, and returning after dark to feel that blessedly cool, cool breeze.

(Fans told you who had dope; if it was turned around, blowing out, and especially if there was a pillow stuffed into the part of the window it didn’t fill, someone was blowing marijuana smoke out of their room.)

That was a hot summer, but not the hottest. That was reserved for Key West in September, where I went to visit a friend one week in 1980. He and his roommate had an un-air conditioned apartment; can you imagine? In Florida? They called it the hovel, and it was, but for a week it was our hovel. The fan ran constantly, on high, the only thing that made it inhabitable at all. It was dying, and the first lesson I learned was DO NOT TOUCH THE FAN. If it was ever turned off, or even turned down, it might not start up again. Sometimes it would slow down, and all conversation would cease as we turned our worried eyes to look. Would this be it? It ran down, down, down, sometimes so slow you could see the blades turning, but then, huzzah! It found its power again, and we’d applaud.

The other thing we did in that apartment was listen to the neighbors fight. The people in the front of the house were scary; he bounced her off the walls, and she would scream and cry. The people next door were merely hilarious, Florida crackers who slept briefly for a couple hours before and just after dawn, after which they’d rise and resume yelling at one another, which they did non-stop. “My boy ain’t no dummy!” “Shut up!” “YOU shut up!” And so on.

Because it was so hot, we went out a lot. Myer’s rum gimlets we drank, at three different bars, including the famous Monster, on Front Street. One night Jeff walked me to the front door, then said he was going back out. To the baths, of course, for the nightcap that would kill him a few years later. He said he never regretted any of it, and I believe him.

That fan’s in a landfill somewhere. Oh, the stories it could tell.

So how was your weekend? We went to Ohio, to celebrate my nephew’s graduation from Ohio State. It rained, and was plenty steamy there, too, but tolerable. Reading the paper Sunday I learned that soon you’ll be able to carry guns pretty much everywhere, including bars, a law that every newspaper, every tavern-owners’ group, opposed, because what really goes with guns, anyway? Liquor, that’s what. Also, the legislature is going to allow fracking — hydraulic fracturing, to extract oil and natural gas from rocks — in state parks. Not state land, mind you, state parks. Where you go to have a picnic, or show your kids what camping is like, or to drink in some natural beauty. I imagine we’ll see logging in Yellowstone in my lifetime, at this rate.

Is “Beautiful Ohio” still the state song? We had to learn it in grade school:

Drifting with the current down a moonlit stream
While above the heavens in their glory gleam
And the stars on high twinkle in the sky
Dreaming of a paradise of love divine
Dreaming of a pair of eyes that looked in mine
Beautiful Ohio, in dreams again I see
Visions of what used to be.

I see visions of a time before they treated their state parks as mining camps.

OK, enough nostalgia! Monday is always a killer, so let’s get to it:

Brian Dickerson, in the Freep, addresses the nightmare I linked to last week, that of the family riven by false sexual-abuse charges, and takes note of the weak-willed and cronied-up judges who aided and abetted the case, surely the worse miscarriage of justice to come down the pike since…the last one.

In the WashPost, Henry Allen identifies America’s problem: WASP rot.

Also in the WashPost, yet another story pointing out the obvious, which will be branded class warfare. Go enjoy your state parks, peasants! (Hope the water at the pump doesn’t catch fire.)

I’m off. Happy week to all.

I’ve been wanting my interns to work on a short video piece — yet another skill the 21st century journalist needs — and last night was our opportunity. I got the three of us aboard a 40-foot racing yacht for a night of it.

It was strictly a fun race, so there’d be no yelling or cursing if one of them got in someone’s way. The boat was big enough that there’d be little need for scrambling and anxiety. The rain earlier in the night blew off and left a lovely evening. The yacht club was having a Hummer-making competition. The crew included a friendly pit bull who helpfully barked at all passing boats. Everything went great — we even won the race — until it came time to back into the slip at the end. The skipper delicately maneuvered into position, hit reverse, and was greeted by a loud, menacing-sounding clatter from below, accompanied by a crew member’s observation that we were taking on water, fast.

Long story short: Some coupler had sheared off from the transmission, and damaged the stuffing box, the point where the drive shaft passes through the hull. That’s where the water was coming in.

Oh, well.

Fortunately, there were other sailors within shouting distance, and we were able to hand-pull ourselves into the slip to offload the journalists and the pit bull. Then it was a short tow to the hoist and dry dock. No biggie, the skip said: “Better it happens here than on the way to Chicago.”

My biggest regret: I had already stowed the cameras — they were in the bag that was getting wet below, in fact — and missed capturing the incident. It wouldn’t have really gone with the narrative, but it might have made for an entertaining parting gift for our host.

And by then, there wasn’t time to sample a Hummer. FML!

(FML, for you people who spend less time online than I do, stands for “fuck my life,” shorthand for a certain sort of whining. Given that it’s most often used when someone has lost car keys and the like, I think it’s entirely fitting here — we had a great evening out, capped by a genuinely interesting near-sinking incident, but it’s FML because there wasn’t time to order an alcoholic milk shake.)

I’m going to have to make one of those this weekend. They were invented at this club, the story goes, by the 75-year-old bartender, Jerome Adams.

And now it’s already growing late, and I have to skedaddle. Slept until eight! ayem! this morning, which makes me feel like I can bend steel with my bare hands. Instead, I’m going to ride my bike to my Friday morning meeting, followed by weights class at the gym. My weekend begins Friday morning.

Bloggage? Let’s see if we can’t scramble a little:

I’m really glad I didn’t watch the Anthony Weiner resignation fiasco.

An extremely, extremely difficult read: The bravest woman in Seattle, a Stranger account of a woman’s courtroom account of her rape, and that of her partner, before an intruder stabbed the latter to death in their home one night. Very graphic, heartbreaking. HT: Mary Helmes Sheely

Because after that we need a major palate-cleanser, Tom & Lorenzo on the Royal Ascot hats. Yeah, baby.

A great weekend to all. It’s clear and temperate outdoors here at the moment. Can’t wait to get outside in it.

I spent the early hours of Bloomsday — happy Bloomsday, all, especially you, stately plump Buck Mulligan — riven with insomnia, so I took the chance to catch up on some reading. First, Michelle Goldberg’s closer look at Michele Bachmann as something other than comic relief. Although lord knows, you have to laugh. First, a scene-setter with Bachmann at a 2005 town-hall meeting, and what happened when two lesbians tried to have a conversation with the congressional candidate:

A few dozen people showed up at the town hall for the April 9 event, and Bachmann greeted them warmly. But when, during the question and answer session, the topic turned to gay marriage, Bachmann ended the meeting 20 minutes early and rushed to the bathroom. Hoping to speak to her, Arnold and another middle-aged woman, a former nun, followed her. As Bachmann washed her hands and Arnold looked on, the ex-nun tried to talk to her about theology. Suddenly, after less than a minute, Bachmann let out a shriek. “Help!” she screamed. “Help! I’m being held against my will!”

Arnold, who is just over 5 feet tall, was stunned, and hurried to open the door. Bachmann bolted out and fled, crying, to an SUV outside. Then she called the police, saying, according to the police report, that she was “absolutely terrified and has never been that terrorized before as she had no idea what those two women were going to do to her.”

GOP front-runner! Yes!

Actually, a more useful response is not to mock. Dave Weigel points out that it’s far wiser to look closer and try to figure out where she got so many of her crazy ideas. Like the one about the slave-owning founding fathers “working tirelessly” to end slavery. That one comes from a man she describes as an intellectual mentor, John Eidsmoe, a professor at the law school at Oral Roberts University, and yes, they have one there:

In books by Eidsmoe and others who approach history from what they call a Christian worldview, this is a truism. Despite his defense of the Confederacy, Eidsmoe also argues that even those founders who owned slaves opposed the institution and wanted it to disappear, and that it was only Christian for them to protect their slaves until it did. “It might be very difficult for a freed slave to make a living in that economy; under such circumstances setting slaves free was both inhumane and irresponsible,” he wrote.

Weigel notes there’s always a market for historical revisionism, and he’s right about that. Particularly for those who backed history’s losing horses, it’s always nice to see, a few years down the road, a critical re-examination of the race that shows your horse was misunderstood, or slipped a mickey in the saddling area, or whatever. You could almost argue that history is revisionism, that no one has a monopoly on truth, and that when you look at things with different eyes, a story looks different. But whether facts do or do not equal truth, this seems a stretch.

Off-topic, but via Ta-Nehisi Coates, a few notes on Shelby Foote’s own peculiar historical myopia.

Then I read, or reread, having skimmed it earlier in the evening, an ex-CIA guy’s account of how the Bush administration requested the agency go after Juan Cole, the University of Michigan scholar and influential Middle East blogger who rose to prominence as one of the most well-informed critics of the Iraq war and related fiascos. I was struck by this passage:

Professor Cole said he would have been a disappointing target for the White House. “They must have been dismayed at what a boring life I lead,” he said.

I don’t doubt it. Cole was one of our seminar speakers the year I spent in Ann Arbor, and my overwhelming impression is that he was a college professor right out of Central Casting’s nerd closet, a multilingual wonk whose idea of fun was to stay up all night reading al-Jazeera and other Arab and Israeli news sources in the original languages. In fact, after that year, when I was doing a brief job tryout at Minnesota Public Radio, I suggested him as a guest for a morning news show. The producer said she’d asked before, and that he declined all live interviews before lunchtime, as he slept late after his overnight web perambulations, and couldn’t be articulate at an early hour.

But I also don’t doubt the administration would do such a thing, either. He was pretty relentless. I bet Cheney was behind that one.

By then I was feeling rather sour, so I read my old college pal Mark’s project, in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, on military suicides. Very grim. Suicide is now the leading cause of death among active-duty personnel. Not what you’d call a day-brightener, and by now daylight was only a couple of hours away.

So I slept a little. Still, I could use something silly at the moment. Time to stop by Cute Overload, where they did not disappoint. A kitten video! Yay.

This is the very last, final, no-more-after-today day of school. Yesterday was a half day, today was a half day. Why not have one last full day and call it a year? Dunno. You’d have to ask an administrator. The only event of the day is yearbook distribution and the talent show, and from now until the day after Labor Day, I am free to sleep until I feel like not sleeping, which I estimate will be 45 extra minutes a day. My nature is to be an early riser, and even sleep deprivation doesn’t really get in the way of that. Dammit.

I keep meaning to change the nightstand book to “Game of Thrones,” which I just finished reading on the iPad. Despite my oft-mentioned distaste for fantasy fiction, I have to say, it’s worth the trip. Not a lot of style in the prose, but the plot makes up for it. As an introduction to e-reading it’s a little frustrating, as the technology doesn’t accommodate my flip-around style, but I’m getting used to it. My sister has taken to her Christmas-gift Kindle like a duck to water, and now reports paper books get on her nerves. Not so much with me, but she has a six-month jump on me. And for those of you who are watching the series, I can only say, DO NOT MISS THE FINALE SUNDAY. You won’t believe the cliffhanger. Or maybe you will. The foreshadowing’s been there all along, but even I was wowed.

OK, at nine minutes to quitting time, I’m slapping some frosting on this misbegotten cake and calling it done. They can’t all be masterpieces. Next time, more sleep.