The heat has broken. Some angry bruises moved through on the radar in the middle of the night, and dropped temperatures like a rock, although not as much as expected. And it didn’t rain more than a few angry spitballs here and there. After one of the wettest springs in anyone’s memory, we’ve now gone a week without rain, and already my neighbors’ sprinklers are coming on in the wee sunrise hours. Is it enough to awaken the household’s most fitful sleeper? Why yes, it is, although I can usually fall back into a doze afterward in the click-click-click white noise. It could be far worse, I know; neighborhoods with wild pheasants get to listen to them crow at the same hour.

A few years ago, I interviewed the head of the groundskeeping crew at Comerica Park about lawn care, for some short thing in a local magazine. Ask the experts, etc. What’s the biggest mistake people make with their own lawns, I asked.

Overwatering. Ha ha.

So how’s everyone today? I’m counting the last few before the end of school, and it can’t really come soon enough. Today and tomorrow are the de facto final days, as next week is a blur of promotion/honors ceremonies, celebratory end-of-year lunches out and, once again, a trip to Cedar Point. At least I don’t have to drag her there this summer; she’s had enough roller-coastering to hold her for the year, and my policy on the Point is every other year. No, this summer I have to drag my daughter and three of her friends to Cleveland, for the Warped Tour show we’re missing because the Detroit stop falls during her summer camp. (Oh, to be 14 again.) The bargain I struck: I will take you to Cleveland, but you must go to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame with me on the same trip. Agreed. And, you must watch the 20-minute movie that ties rock ‘n’ roll to Delta blues and African tribal rhythms, because lo, it is educational. Agreed. Kate has much sneering contempt for what she calls “butt rock,” which seems to boil down to “anything my parents like, or the parents of any of my friends,” although she’ll allow that the Ramones might still approach coolness. And though she’d never, ever admit it, she might occasionally have a thought that her parents’ taste in butt rock might exceed that of her friends’ parents, one of whom asked her, while playing Guitar Hero, if her mother (that would be me, in this convoluted sentence of unclear antecedents) was “a member of the Kiss Army” back in the day.

“Jesus Christ, no. Are you kidding me?” I replied in horror upon hearing this. I try to keep the pottymouth to a minimum around her, but if anything called for taking the Lord’s name in vain, it’s the idea that I ever, ever listened to Kiss with anything approaching pleasure and affirmation. My sole grudging acknowledgement of their presence on earth is a copy of “Detroit Rock City” in my iTunes, and even that is the Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ version, a gift from Ashley Morris when we moved here. Ashley liked Kiss, but his overall coolness trumps the Lame factor, and besides, he was younger than me. We all have our guilty pleasures from high school, but the first Kiss album was released when I was already in college, and was listening to Roxy Music. I stuck the first Roxy Music CD in the car player last winter, and asked Kate what she thought of “Re-Make/Re-Model.” She listened for about four seconds and delivered her default shrug. Which means: Butt rock.

OK, then. The morning is fleeting, so let’s skip to the bloggage:

I followed the link LAMary posted yesterday to Jezebel post on rabbit showjumping. I’d seen the video before, but I hadn’t seen the amazing still photos of the same activity in the Daily Mail. In my riding days, I probably looked at a million photos of horses clearing fences, but these are fascinating in a whole new way. It’s striking how similar the jumping form of the two animals is. Now all they need is some mouse “riders,” and we’re on our way to Cute Overload. A final note: The headline and story both refer to rabbit jumping as “dressage.” You’d think a daily newspaper in a country where equestrian sports were invented would know what dressage is, but obviously not. It ain’t jumping.

I generally stay away from any site with “watch” in the title, but these clips of David Barton, yet another right-wing scholar, beggar belief.

I’ve been neglecting Tom & Lorenzo lately, mainly because their redesign bugs me, but I need to get back in the habit:

What’s the point in showing up to a children’s benefit if you’re going to scowl like a mafioso in all the pictures? Once again, he looks like a kid wearing his big brother’s suit. It’s not a bad suit and normally the fact that it’s too big on him wouldn’t cause us to take so many points off, but his perma-scowl is pissing us off and making him unpleasant to look at, so… Score: 4/10. Lighten the fuck up, dude.

Who else could this be about? Marc Anthony, Mr. J-Lo.

OK, must dash.

One of my neighbors has outdoor speakers, and is enjoying them now. I’d never before noticed how lame the great American songbook can sound when given the full attention of a certain sort of cocktail pianist — the kind who plays as though paid by the note. “Someone to Watch Over Me” is a lovely song, but less so when you can practically see the performer energetically tickling the ivories. Every one of them. In glissando.

Oh, well. It beats the Shirley Bassey/Barbra Streisand/Steve and Eydie compilations I sometimes hear coming from that direction. I didn’t know Shirley Bassey had a career beyond singing the “Goldfinger” theme until I met one of my boyfriend’s mothers, who was exactly the sort of woman Mike Myers immortalized in Linda Richman. She loved Shirley Bassey. So do many people, evidently. Something I didn’t know before today: She’s Welsh, like that other great interpreter of James Bond movie themes, Tom Jones.

Welcome to the week, after a lovely weekend. Saturday was stiflingly hot, but I guess I’ll take it. And yesterday was better, but Sunday is really the beginning of my work week, so meh. I did take a little time to run bike errands. Went to Lowe’s, in the mall near beb’s and CrazyCatLady’s house, which Grosse Pointe mom-scuttlebutt says is LIKE TAKING YOUR LIFE IN YOUR HANDS OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU WENT THERE. Two years ago, I got an email with approximately 7,000 forwards in the address field, from a woman who claimed she had her purse snatched there. I don’t doubt it; it happens. Someone else had added, along the way: “And I know there are frequent forcible rapes in the parking lot.” This I do doubt, but what can you do? People will believe anything if it confirms already-existing fears. But I needed some Dishwasher Magic, and it wasn’t going to buy itself. It’s a straight, bike-friendly shot west from my house, through Harper Woods, a middle/working-class suburb, and the route takes me down a street with towering oaks and deep, enormous lots, even though the houses on them are fairly modest. You can get a glimpse, here and there, of fabulous gardens and, yes, the occasional above-ground swimming pool. (I always want to ask if that’s the InstaRust model or the Skeeter Breeder.)

Then there’s the mall, and Lowe’s had Dishwasher Magic, as well as one of the local police chiefs, dressed in weekend shlump-wear, with no apparent sidearm. He must feel safe there. But as I was already warmed up and in the mood, I rolled farther down Old Homestead Road, to St. Sabbas the Sanctified, surely one of the weirder things to sit smack in the middle of a middle-class residential neighborhood around here. I’ve written about this Russian monastery before, part of the “patriarchal Bulgarian archdiocese of America, Canada and Australia,” although I haven’t been back since. I was interested to see whether the brothers have expanded their footprint at all — I think they’re on about six lots now. Couldn’t tell. It being Sunday, I assume they were at prayer. A hired tree guy was taking down a sizable maple limb wrenched loose in a recent storm. I remembered my main takeaway from my first visit — women must cover their heads, lest they arouse demons — turned around and pedaled home.

Some bloggage today, much of it excellent:

Brian Dickerson on the Kevorkian problem, i.e., yes, he did it wrong, but how often does the clumsy person who does it first ever do it right?

For “Game of Thrones” fans, a map of Westeros. Click to enlarge.

Don’t think that just because this story is about how Anna Nicole Smith met her elderly husband, you don’t want to read it. I was hooked here:

It began—all of it, really—when an old, sad man decided to give his life one last go.

J. Howard Marshall II was sitting in the backseat of his Mercedes sedan one afternoon in Houston in October 1991. He was 86 years old and in the throes of a terrible mourning. He was, his staff worried, suicidal.

Dan Manning, Marshall’s friend and personal driver, was particularly concerned.

“J. Howard,” Manning said, looking up at him in the rearview mirror, “I’ve been thinking.”

There was a pause. “Go ahead.”

“I’ve been thinking maybe it might be time for a new young lady.”

J. Howard looked at Manning in the mirror. He said, “You might be right.”

The GOP’s unyielding orthodoxy — no new taxes. An examination of what it’s gained and lost.

And is that it? I believe it is. Time to take the morning’s breakfast out of the oven — a spinach-and-garlic frittata — and see if it was worth the trouble. Happy Monday, happy week, all.

On the first of every month, I:

1) Verify and repair the permissions on my hard drive;
2) Empty the trash on my hard drive;
3) Throw my contact lenses away and start wearing a new pair.

I have no idea why I do the first two, except that someone told me it’s a good idea, like flossing. OK, whatever. The contact lens thing still bugs me, though. I believe I paid $300 for my first pair of Bausch & Lomb SofLens, in the early ’80s, or approximately $50,000 in today’s dollars. That was two months’ rent for me, but so worth it. They were revolutionary! B&L bought magazine ads with a photo of water droplets on a pane of glass. “Can you tell which is the Bausch & Lomb SofLens?” the copy ran. No, you couldn’t. That was also the experience of millions of early adopters when they dropped one of the slippery little buggers on the sink. But unless you were a millionaire, you learned to tell them apart; after all, each one cost $150.

That was only the beginning. There was a whole chemistry set of solutions that came with them — cleaners, storage, disinfectant, a weekly soak that involved tablets fizzing in little plastic vessels. Or you could go for heat disinfection, which meant boiling your lenses for a few minutes. Both were a pain in the ass, but the contacts were wonderful. You didn’t get that squint the hard-lens wearers all had, and soft ones could never “pop out,” which happened frequently. It was common, at the time, to walk into a room and find one or two or three people on their hands and knees, searching a shag carpet for a tiny piece of plastic, which might or might not be found. If it was, the grateful party would scurry off to the bathroom for a re-insertion or, depending on his or her comfort with carpet germs, merely pop it in the mouth for a re-wet and do it on the spot.

That was pretty gross. But it happened all the time. What were you going to do? Carry it home in your pocket? Lenses, hard and soft, were expensive. You could buy insurance for contacts.

Hank Stuever once wrote me about losing a lens when he was a kid, on a hayride. His mom took him back to the scene of the crime to look for it, hours later — expensive! — and they actually found it, a single contact lens on a hay wagon, which must be the modern equivalent of the needle in a haystack. And what did young Hank do next? Squirted some solution on it and put it back in his eye. I understand Hank’s mother is now a nun. If she’s ever nominated for sainthood, I think the fact her son isn’t known today as the blind TV critic should count as one of her miracles. (Finding it could be No. 2.)

I wore my last pair of contacts for five years. I’ve always been scrupulous about care, and I didn’t wear them every day, but often enough that my optometrist gaped in horror when I told him how long it had been since I’d re-upped. In that time, he informed me, pretty much the entire industry had gone to two-week or four-week, even daily disposables. You bought lenses by the box now, and it was important to throw them away on schedule, lest you tempt eye infections. Part of me thinks yeah yeah and wants to mention all those shag carpet lens searches, and once I did. My current optometrist replied with a confession to having once retrieved a lens from the sink drain at a college party, rinsing it a little under the tap, and popping it back in.

But you don’t need to do that anymore, she added. Lenses are cheap now. Kate wears daily-wear and I, month-long multifocals, and my total expenditures for both of us, including solution, probably is about what I paid for my first pair of SofLenses and all their attendant solutions. Today she told me she was coming to the bottom of her box, and would I please order more, the way you ask the designated grocery-buyer in the household to put ketchup on the list.

I spared her the 700-word lecture you just read. Why bother?

A little bloggage before I go? Sure:

My former colleague Dave Jones, an Ohio State grad and now a sportswriter in Pennsylvania, speaks to the Jim Tressel affair from the place where it matters most. Mr. Albom, this is how you stir emotion in a sports column. Not the way you do it.

This story — about how one guy, Joshua Kaufman, was able to retrieve his stolen laptop, using a program called Hidden — just about sold me on it. Funny, too.

In keeping with today’s theme of God I Am So OLD, may I just say that reading today’s news, about Andrew Anthony Weiner and the underpants-boner picture, only underscores the above. God, I remember when John Tower was run off the reservation for drinking too much and hitting on women. Imagine, in 1989, being told that the news in 22 years would involve whether an elected official did or did not send a photo of his wing-wang — with his phone! — to a woman, and that the stories the morning of June 2, 2011 would be led by the elected official’s failure to categorically deny whether that was his wing-wang.

I hope I live another 22 years. God knows what we’ll be talking about then.

Happy Thursday, all.

To the surprise of all who know him, Alan announced one day a couple weeks ago that the time had come for him to get an iPhone. He’s no Luddite, but he is the most phone-indifferent man I know. He forgets his phone, or leaves it in the car, or in the boat bag, or in a pair of pants he hasn’t worn in a while. If I had a nickel for all the times we’ve looked for it by calling it and seeking out the ringing from the dry-cleaning pile, I’d be writing this from Barbados. He doesn’t want to be one of those guys with a holster on his belt and the constant yap-yap-yapping, and I’d say he’s succeeded.

But then he lost his iPod, and the dirt-cheap clamshell spent the night on the deck of the boat during a shower, and he had a mixed-signals night trying to find Kate that would have been aided by text messaging, and the day finally came. Down we went to the AT&T store, re-upped with the Death Star for another two years, exchanged my dying 3G for a 3GS and got the same for Alan. And now I know if I call him, he’ll answer, because that sucker hasn’t gotten far from his hand since last weekend, and here’s why:

The radio. My poor husband has a musically adventurous soul at a time when radio has been turned over to corporate monsters to squeeze of every extant dollar. There is satellite, true, but hello, I DO NOT NEED ANOTHER MONTHLY BILL, and the sub- sub- sub- sub-nicheification of the market, while gratifying for people who are into that sort of thing, doesn’t help much. Maybe I like dubstep-influenced hip-hop, who knows, but I can’t find it, I can’t spend hours tracking it down and I’m not going to spend hours listening to a station devoted to it.

Fortunately, there are a few radio stations out there that still cater to people whose tastes run beyond sales charts and Grammy nominees, and almost all of them have web streams now. One is CJAM, a Canadian station from the University of Windsor that Alan picks up when he’s driving home from work at 1 a.m. or so, but only for a few minutes. Is there anything more evocative than a radio station playing great music in the middle of the night? I can’t tell you how many mornings I’ve found him scouring the internet for clues on some unidentified track that faded out before it was ID’d. I’m not sure if we ever put a label on the selection he described as “Jimi Hendrix at 50 fathoms,” but lord knows we tried. Another is KCRW, the public station out of Los Angeles, and its “Morning Becomes Eclectic” show, which exposed David Chase to A3 and “Woke Up This Morning,” which became the theme for “The Sopranos.” Still another is WWOZ, out of New Orleans and specializing in the music of that city; we had it on for a few hours the other night, and it was a revelation.

We turn ’em on, plug the iPhone into the stereo, and forget all about Clear Channel and the rest of those bastards, if only for a little while.

“Can I plug this in on the boat and not go over my data limit?” he asked the other day. Criminy. Have I unleashed a monster? He might need an upgrade to the higher-use plan. Speaking of monthly bills.

By the way, if you know the answer to that question, I’m all ears. What is the data use of streaming radio?

I have a car repair scheduled this morning, so off I go. First, bloggage:

I’m staying away from Weinergate, having had my fill, for the moment, of stories that involve or suggest bulging underwear. Someone else tell me if I need to care about this.

While we’re at New York magazine, three more tiny photos of the next lavishly photographed Princess Clotheshorse, Charlene Wittstock, whom I will continue to refer to as the Teutonic blonde giantess. Because if the shoe fits, etc.

Granny finally passed, at 106. Another Detroitblog gem on her banner year.

Mind your manners on the airplanes, please.

And I’m outta here. Happy Wednesday.

Should have known the good weather wouldn’t last long. I’m sitting in my living room in utter gloom, all the shades wide open, and it’s as dark at 9 a.m. as it will be at 9 p.m. What could it be? Why, more rain on the way. Yippee, rain.

Alan took the boat out for its shakedown over the weekend, and said the lake is full of floating logs and other debris washed down in recent deluges. Which immediately sent me spinning back to 1973 and my first visit to Michigan. I’m 15, and my friend Paul has invited me and two other girls to his cottage in the Les Cheneaux Islands, in the U.P. Every night we tuck a couple 12-packs of Stroh’s under our arms and go to someone else’s cottage to party, or else they come to us. This involves much night boating under the blackest skies and brightest stars I’ve ever seen. Paul knows the water and can navigate the whole area without lights, but every night as we leave his grandmother warns us about “deadheads.” The winter was tough, the spring rains heavy — you might be reading about 1973 elsewhere this week, as the Mississippi floods — and the retreating ice tore up a lot of docks, leaving their timbers still floating here and there. That’s a deadhead. You don’t want to hit one in your boat, and responsible boaters, when they spot one, are expected to tow them to shore, if possible. They are the car-swallowing potholes of the seas.

Paul’s grandmother, Cor, had a very distinctive voice, and as soon as we got out of the house we’d repeat her warnings to one another, in the Cor voice: “Why, your mother and John Pumphrey were coming home one night, and they found a piano crate! Floating in the channel at Dollar Island! Thank God John was using the spotlight! That’s what I’m talking about! You just never know!”

We never used the spotlight. We didn’t hit any deadheads, although “watch out for floating piano crates” lived for years as an in-joke in our gang. And now I’m telling her stories. And somewhere Cor is laughing.

Rain coming any minute now. Come on, rain.

I shouldn’t complain. ROGirl just posted this Daily Mail photo spread of mind-boggling images from Joplin. How on earth do you survive something like that? And speaking of mind-boggling, it’s worth a scarce NYT click-through for the photo with this story; the caption tell us the photographer captured the image “from outside her front door before seeking shelter.” That would have to be the case, because otherwise, that camera would be 15 miles away, under where the flying cow came to rest.

Yeesh. Let’s skip to the bloggage:

Lance Armstrong’s clay feet continue to erode. I made up my mind a long time ago that St. Lance was almost certainly dirty, but that doesn’t negate the good he’s done, or tried to do, does it? Would he be an effective fundraiser for cancer if he were merely the 20th-best cyclist in the world? Complicated people, complicated questions. But simply dirty; I just don’t see how it could be any other way.

A friend of mine ruined “The Sound of Music” for me some years back, by pointing out the obvious: “Captain Von Trapp is old enough to have a daughter who is 16 going on 17, right? And Maria is a novitiate at the abbey, so she’s how old? Eighteen, maybe 19? The nuns keep calling her a girl, anyway. So when he marries Maria, he’s choosing a wife who is barely older than his daughter. And the daughter calls her ‘mother.’ Sorry, too creepy for me.”

I had never thought of this. The only thing that bugged me was how a landlocked country like Austria could have a navy. (Answer: The Austro-Hungarian Empire.)

Anyway, she sent me this yesterday, a letter to friends announcing the end of the engagement between the captain and Baroness Schraeder:

Please, friends, don’t worry about me. While I was a bit startled to be thrown aside for someone who flunked out of nun school, I assure you that I will be fine, and my main pursuits in life shall continue to be martinis, bon mots, and looking fabulous. You’ll also be glad to know I have retained custody of the Captain’s hard-drinking gay friend, Max. Anyone who gets tired of sing-a-longs should feel free to look us up.

A few notes on “King Lear,” a play you can’t even begin to understand until you’re 40, and maybe not even then.

And with that, I’m going to put a pork shoulder in the crock pot with some cumin, onion and dried peppers, add a little water and see what comes out in a few hours.

If nothing else, I hope my students learn from me how to write a lead (“lede” to you journos) for a story when circumstances will dictate you’re going to be among the last to file. It isn’t supposed to be like this for online news; we’re the hypercaffeinated tweeters filing via 3G and wifi so that you learn things in more or less real time.

But in this case — the school board meeting following the firings of the principal and his underling — that wasn’t going to happen. Our competition at Patch goes to meetings with a wifi stick on her laptop, and covers them via Facebook updates. Mixed results on that one, I’d say. If it’s a hot meeting, it works. Otherwise it amounts to public note-taking. But last night was a big ol’ foregone conclusion. What was the board going to do? Beg them to stay? And when the reporter is a college student and the editor leaves the meeting to go immediately to her other job, we’re not going to beat TV, and we’re not going to beat Patch, and we’re not even going to beat the papers. So write a fancy lede, play up the atmosphere, and go for the fourth-paragraph chop. (Not quite a Miller Chop, but it’s there.)

Jeez, I’m tired. Worked yesterday from 9:30 a.m. to 1 a.m., with a two-hour break to lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling and wonder why I don’t have time to write a novel. If I did, I’d call it “Porno Principal,” because that’s a great title.

Needless to say, I didn’t see Barry O’Bama’s speech in Ireland yesterday, but at the urging of our own mild-mannered Jeff, I looked it up on the White House’s website. It sings on the page, so I’m sure it danced a merry jig with the first great orator of the 21st century delivering it:

My name is Barack Obama of the Moneygall Obamas. And I’ve come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.

Good one.

Since I have nothing much to report today, here’s some bloggage y’all can chew on:

Toe-suckin’ Dick Morris was disinvited from a GOP event at the request of the governor, and he ain’t happy about it: “Apparently free speech has its limits in Snyder’s Michigan.” Oh, shut up. If it’s that damn important, say it on a street corner, no one will stop you. Please note this is about a local issue — the Ambassador Bridge — and not necessarily about deep divisions within the party. Morris is the bridge owner’s latest paid mouthpiece, which may indicate how tone-deaf he is.

And what did Mrs. O’Bama wear on her trip to Ireland? Dunno, but T-Lo is on the case for her stop in England. I think she looks smashing, but what’s up with Camilla’s hat? That seems a bit much. Maybe she has alopecia.

And with that, I must move over to the other pile of copy on my virtual desk, and get to real work. Tuesday is the new Monday.

The Free Press may have been covering Aretha Franklin in Chicago, but I was at the somewhat less glamorous spring concert of the Brownell Middle School instrumental-music students. Three grades, many combinations and recombinations — 6th-grade strings, 7th- and 8th-grade band, etc. The show ran past 90 minutes, mainly from all the shuffling, but no one cared. Kate’s ensemble, the jazz band, went last. They’re the only purely extracurricular music group in the school, this being a district that believes in arts education, a fading concept in today’s miserly public-school culture. The saddest scenes in this season’s “Treme” are of the New Orleans children in band class, learning how to keep time with finger snaps, because their instruments haven’t traveled down whatever tortuous path, through however many sticky-fingered bureaucrats, to make it to the band room just yet.

No problem with that here. The instruments (rented, mostly) gleam. The director told a story about rehabilitating the school’s harp for a particular number, with the help of a private teacher. Does your school have a harp? I’d imagine that’s a luxury for most. Kate had a little moment in a number called “One Flight Down” (not the Norah Jones song), where she had to carry the rhythm section for a series of baby-step improvisations by trumpet and sax players. It was nice. I told her so, afterward. She said her hand had been cramping and she couldn’t hear herself, so she assumed she’d screwed it up. Where do girls learn this sort of effortless self-effacement? From other girls, if my memory serves. Think too highly of yourself, and you’re stuck-up. The trick is to effusively praise all your friends while deflecting any compliments: I love your hair. It’s so pretty. I wish I had your hair. My hair is so ugly. Or, alternatively: Your thighs are so skinny, I wish I had legs like yours. But my hair is awful. You have better hair. They spend all their time creating an ideal self, made from parts of all the other selves they see around them. How long does this last? Until age 30 or so, I think.

Anyway, I saw Paul Clemens there. Reminded me he ignored my last e-mail, if it even made it past the spam filter. What author flogging a book wouldn’t want valuable publicity from a hyperlocal website? I mean, so what if he’s been on “The Daily Show,” I run GrossePointeToday.com, which draws tens of eyeballs every day. Well, at least now I know he’s in the Brownell phone directory.

I read that Aretha story, linked above. I expect the Freep will be covering all of Aretha’s concerts from now on, sort of a deathwatch deal, although as they point out, she seems healthy and in good voice. I hope this is the last time we’ll see the phrase “triumphant return” in a headline, however. That’s another one of those journo-clichés that has no opposite; everyone’s return is triumphant, or else it’s not noted. Charlie Sheen’s better-received Chicago show, after his Detroit disaster, was probably called a triumphant return to the one-man-train-wreck stage.

A long week, and I’m glad it’s over. We had another bank robbery here, right around the corner from my house, in fact. I have to stop reading about these things on Facebook, because it makes my eyes cross, some of the ignorant stuff people say. For instance: “Too bad no one had a gun, so they could have blown the guy’s face off.” Yeah, that is a virtual guarantee of a happy ending to any armed robbery, don’t you agree? Guy walks into a bank and sticks it up, and some dime-store avenger pulls his own gun, and for what? To keep a federally insured financial institution from losing a couple grand. Of course it would have gone well, because the avenger is able to pull his piece without attracting attention, his aim is true, and the worst anyone gets is a bad dry-cleaning bill. The things some people must fantasize about. It makes you shudder.

Not much bloggage today; I’m tapioca. But a little:

For the first time, a majority of Americans support gay marriage. Enjoy your island while it lasts social conservatives; you’re no longer connected to dry land, and the tide is rising.

Unless, of course, the Rapture occurs this weekend. Then you might be OK.

First comes grandchild, then comes marriage — OK, with different kids, but still. $P is a mother of the groom. Congratulations and happiness to the non-embarrassing members of the family.

And with that, I’m late and must run. Happy weekend, all.

I had a colleague back in the day. Southern guy. Had a way with profanity, which always sounds better in a drawl. “How you doing, Steve?” I’d ask.

“I’m busier’n a dawg with two dicks, that’s how I’m doin’,” he’d say.

One day he answered, “Wahl, I really wish I hadn’t put a hunnert pounds o’ Turf Builder on my lawn this year.”

Yeah? Why is that?

“Cuz I’m mowin’ twice a week. It’s growin’ like Cambodia.”

Whenever I consider my lawn in spring — untreated with Turf Builder, I might add — I consider that phrase. Growin’ like Cambodia. For six weeks it’s done nothing but rain. I’m watching a robin hunt at the moment, and it’s the size of a chicken, so plentiful are earthworms at the surface of the saturated turf. The world is so green it’s positively Irish, and even though I know it won’t last, I’m going to enjoy it a while. If nothing else, it’s too wet to mow.

Not that that will stop the lawn services. Thursday is the day my neighbors on both sides have their appointments, and for about an hour, you cannot have a conversation in my bedroom with the window open. It’s maddening. I tell myself to consider the alternative. I tell myself that with a four-man crew, they’re done quickly. I tell myself many other things, many featuring swear words. If I really wanted peace and quiet, I’d move to the ghetto. Gunfire makes far less noise than you’d think, and it’s over faster.

Since Alan got into shooting, that’s been the big revelation: Real gunfire sounds nothing like it does in the movies. In movies, shotguns go boom; in real life, they go crack. In fact, all guns crack, pretty much, at least the ones I’ve heard. I remember Westerns of old, when in gunfight scenes every fourth shot was sweetened with that ricochet sound effect — pop pop pop p-chew. Actually, Westerns are veritable aural forests of wrong sounds. The guns sound wrong, and the horses are always neighing. Spend any time at all around horses, and you realize they’re actually pretty quiet animals. They nicker at feeding time and blow their noses from time to time, but you can go weeks without hearing one neigh. A few of the mares would whinny when they were in heat, but once I moved to a professionally run barn, where the mares are given hormones to keep that sort of thing in check, you never heard it.

(Lest you think this sort of thing is cruel to the mares, I can say only this: Wait until one stops dead in front of you, spraddles her hind legs, raises her tail and “winks” at the gelding you’re riding. You’ll change your mind.)

And lest you think I have the wrong shotgun, one sunny afternoon in Fort Wayne the cops shot a charging pit bull with their cop-issue pump-action shotgun, and it also sounded like a crack. A very loud one, but nothing like the throaty boom you hear on TV.

Good lord, where am I going with this? You can tell it’s Thursday, the most sleep-deprived of the week. I keep pouring coffee in, but only nonsense comes out.

So let’s check in with the writers who got more sleep last night, shall we?

Daily Mail love: The UK tabloid says John Edwards is very mad at his baby mama, for not destroying their sex tape. It further says the tape was made in Indianapolis, and helpfully includes a shot of the downtown skyline, with this cutline:

Sex and the city: Edwards and Hunter made the sex tape in a hotel room in Indianapolis

I would have written something different:

Sex and the city: Bad things happen in Indianapolis hotel rooms. Ask Mike Tyson.

Or maybe:

Naptown: The Edwards sex tape was made in Indianapolis, because there’s nothing else to do there.

I know, I know: Not true. Just teasing the next Super Bowl city.

The boy who shot his neo-Nazi dad to death speaks. Big surprise: Dad was a violent shit. I don’t know what sound that one made, but maybe it was that of his family’s souls being freed from bondage.

Jon Stewart rounds up your NewtNews of the week. Includes the glitter bomb and angry Iowan.

Any Detroiters interested in biking the bridge? Fifty-five bucks seems a little steep, unless it’s for charity or something. And presumably, as with all things bridge-related, Mr. Moroun will take a big taste. And I have to carry my passport…to go halfway across the bridge? Nothing about this makes sense.

OK, time to salvage what I can of this day. Enjoy Thursday.

First thing this morning: Editing an intern’s story for the website. What a joy to handle copy that doesn’t require major surgery. Give me a kid whose only story notes are “learn the difference between citizens and residents,” and I can teach that one something.

My online dictionary has them as virtual synonyms, but my online dictionary is full of shit. Citizens carry passports, residents only a driver’s license. Do not make this mistake in your daily writing again. Tomorrow we’ll tackle “convince” and “persuade.”

Kate’s been having a grind of it lately, between school and track and having a spring cold. But she’s holding up her end with more aplomb than I would have mustered at her age, so I was looking for some little reward I could offer her for the homestretch of the year. Tickets to the Movement festival downtown over Memorial Day weekend? Better ask first; kids her age have strong ideas about what’s cool and what’s lame, and for all I know, techno and electronica is the latter. This would be one of those affairs where we’d go along; no way am I turning my kid loose in the middle of something like this without at least one adult within shouting distance. What would I say as she left the car? “No ecstasy, honey!”

But as I said: Better ask first. She and her friends have complicated flow charts of the various sects of youth culture; you should hear them expound on the difference between hipsters and scenesters, both of which they disapprove of and neither of which I could confidently identify. The last time I asked what a scenester was, it involved “some girl, and she takes a picture of herself with her webcam, and she’s like holding up her hand like a claw, and underneath it says dinosaurs go rawr.” OK, whatever.

Maybe I should put it this way: I’d like to go to Movement. Maybe she’d like to come along.

Would you?

I have Russian homework to do, so let’s skip to the bloggage:

Hungover owls. To fill the gap left by Fuck You, Penguin, I guess. (Forget electronic music; this is what I should be schooling my kid in — coming up with one amusing idea broad enough to sustain a single quickie book sold at Urban Outfitters and hello, University of Michigan B-school! We’d spend her college fund on a boat.)

To give the oft-abused Mitch Albom his due, I will admit that of all his media personae, he plays best on the radio. In that universe of outsize jerkoffs, his regular-guy act, false though it may be, resembles something approaching normalcy. So I’m sure that if I’d heard this on-air confrontation with local right-wing host Frank Beckmann, I’d have been on Team Mitch. Beckmann, a Limbaugh manqué whose act I caught once (lasted about three minutes, snapped it off, never went back) has been claiming Albom’s staunch defense of the Michigan film incentives constitute some sort of journalistic conflict of interest, because one of his books is a movie-in-progress. Albom has stated before that he gets paid — has already been paid, in fact — no matter where the project shoots, and his interest is strictly for the local people who will work on it.

Can I get it on the record? I agree with Mitch Albom. Yes, I AGREE WITH MITCH ALBOM. He’s right about this. “Have a Little Faith” could shoot in Cleveland or Toronto or Timbuktu, and it won’t make no never-mind to his end. He’s already moved on to shuffling headshots of who will be his next on-air portrayer, having already used up Hank Azaria and Michael Imperioli. (I’ve got five bucks on Shia LaBeouf, although this is a — snicker — Hallmark production, so they will probably go a little cheaper.) I’m sure I still would have laughed at this exchange:

Albom’s tenor went airborne a few times, and when he commented that Beckmann “wasn’t knowledgeable” about the issue, Beckmann’s baritone boomed out, “Oh, so I’m stupid?”

Then: “Of course, you’re knowledgeable, Mitch. It must be a burden to carry that around.”

I wouldn’t have been able to resist that fat soft one up the middle. Yes, you’re stupid, Frank. This isn’t a hard one to figure out. Ultimately, though, this is like a war between two people you can’t stand. Whoever wins, you win.

Gene Weingarten Twittered this under his “should be convicted on mugshot alone” series. I’d call it: Forceps babies, the later chapters.

Better get out of here before lightning strikes. On a day when I can find something nice to say about Mitch, anything can happen.

Happy Wednesday, all.

Comments turned on now. Don’t know how they got turned off. But J.C. fixed it with his mad webmasterin’ skills. Thanks, John!

I feel like I start every day with a weather report, but this is Michigan, and weather is something you have to pay attention to — brutal in summer and winter, lovely in spring and fall, except for this spring, when it’s been brutal. I’m writing this on Sunday, when it might reach 50 degrees, but probably won’t, and even if it does, it won’t matter, because it’s raining hard, and blowing hard, and, well, balls.

But Friday was very fine, warm and muggy, and good thing, because we celebrated our anniversary that day. Eighteen years. We went to the Dirty Dog Jazz Cafe in Grosse Pointe Farms. What a miracle that place is. The owner, Gretchen Valade, is a jazz fan and heiress, something you don’t always find in one body, particularly one who grew up in the Farms, where estate sales tend to carry lots of Perry Como records, but there you are. A while back she saved the Detroit Jazz Festival with a seven-figure gift. She started a record label to give promising artists a place to get started. And then she opened the Dirty Dog, in the heart of the snootiest of all the Pointes, and there’s not a single thing anyone can object to — two seatings a night, at 6 and 8:30, with live jazz starting at 30 minutes past sit-down and running through dessert. In other words, a perfect evening for an old married couple, because you don’t have to carry the conversation through the whole time. You hit the highlights during cocktails, then settle in to listen to music.

And it’s not a cafe at all, but fine dining. I had the seafood fricassee, Alan the salmon. ‘Twas all good.

Oh, and Ms. Valade’s family fortune? Her maiden name is Carhartt. Yep, the workingman’s first choice in insulated coveralls. I read an interview with her once where she said she always felt inadequate among the other Grosse Pointe debs, because their families were all in cars and other industry, and hers only made blue jeans.

Outside magazine ran a piece a few years ago, about an annual get-together in Alaska, where people who have had near-death experiences in extremely cold weather credit their survival to their Carhartts:

“One time,” says Doug Tweedie, Carhartt’s man in Alaska for the last 25 years, “there was this walrus attacked a guy tying his boat up to a dock somewhere in the Aleutian chain who said what saved him were the black extreme-heavy-duty Carhartts the walrus’s chompers couldn’t bite through.”

Last laughs, anyone?

So here I am on Sunday, doing about the only thing it’s fit to do — watching Kate get her hair colored, and trying out MY BRAND-NEW IPAD SQUEE. Writing via a Bluetooth keyboard I picked up with my Amazon bucks (thank you, all). So far I like it, although it’s odd to use a keyboard and still occasionally have to reach out and touch the screen. I’m going for a certain super-minimalism in my travel gear, and I think this fills the bill. I’ll keep you posted.

Because I have no idea how long the connection will stay this strong, a hop to the bloggage.

From the WashPost, a few ideas for spring cleaning, starting with that particular bane, the engagement ring:

The diamond industry, in its infinite marketing savvy, seems to have convinced young couples that the only way to declare a lifetime commitment is for a man to ruinously spend two or three months’ salary on the proper rock. Men write to me to say that they’re ready to get married, but given school debt and the depressed economy, they simply can’t afford a good enough ring, and they despair whether they’ll ever be able to pop the question. Here’s a secret that the folks at De Beers don’t want young people to know: All you need to do to become officially engaged is tell everyone, “We’re getting married!”

Word on that. I never wanted an engagement ring, and I’m still a plain gold band girl. I once worked with a silly young woman, the sort who read women’s magazines and fell head over heels for all this b.s., and she introduced me to a new concept that must not have caught on, but it did with her — engagement rings for men, too. They weren’t diamond solitaires, but some sort of manly-ish thing. I wonder if she’s still married.

Others from the list — smartphones, tipping and “The Simpsons.”

If you missed Moe’s contribution to last day’s comments, the shortest deposition ever. It reminds me of a motion filing we used to pass around in Columbus, by one of Larry Flynt’s lawyers. It was prompted by a cop’s testimony in a prostitution sting, which involved attempted oral sex in a hot tub. By the time the lawyer had established the depth of the hot tub, the officer’s position in it and the fact the woman was not wearing snorkel equipment, it was pretty much a done deal that the cop was not going to sit still for a physical exam, which is what the filing requested. Case dismissed.

Finally, the columnist for the other paper in Fort Wayne writes about my old zip code without once explaining where, exactly, it is. This might have been in a graphic in the print edition, but not online. Oopsie.

OK, better get out of here before the internet slows again. Upload to server in 3,2,1…