God help me, I can’t believe I’m linking two days running to something Prospero dropped into comments, but here goes:

Rand Paul, senator of Kentucky, says he can’t find a toilet that works. Anywhere!

“You flush them 10 times and they don’t work,” he mourned — ranted, really — during an Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing recently. None of the toilets in his house work. For years, he’s been waiting for the right platform to tell the world that you use the powder room at the Pauls’ old Kentucky home at your own risk of embarrassment.

We’ve discussed this before, haven’t we? As I recall, Alex has lousy low-flows, and Peter and I have good ones. Ours went in last year, and I have yet to see it defeated by anything I asked it to handle. If I had my druthers and lived in a dry climate, I’d replace the other two, as well. They’re quiet and refill quickly, without the endlessly singing pipes of the others.

But conservatives, to a (wo)man, can never get theirs to work. I think we need to draw some conclusions here.

1) Conservatives are so full of shit they can’t dispose of it quickly enough via the usual means; and
2) Conservatives can’t find competent plumbers. Well, we all met Joe the P., didn’t we? I’m not surprised.

Seriously, though. The Wall Street Journal last week was complaining about the newer energy-efficient washing machines, too. They don’t get clothes clean! They’re wussy and green and well, damn it all, anyway.

It so happens I’m in partial agreement with them on front-loading washers, although I wouldn’t give mine up. More on that in a minute.

And finally, we have Mona Charen — still rockin’ the 1982-era headshot, I see — bitching about her dishwasher not working. Oh, woe is her:

Bits of spaghetti, stiff and stubborn, stuck like stalactites to bowls. The walls and doors of the machine emerged waxy and coated from each wash, in contrast to the gleaming surfaces of the past. Between the tines of forks, ugly bits of hardened remains resembled something you’d see on “NCIS” — if not quite repellent, then certainly unwelcome from what should have been a disinfected, pristine dishwasher!

(I tell my students: Save your exclamation points for 900-foot-tall Jesus sightings. I also think it’s amusing that Mona watches “NCIS.”)

The problem, once again, is “environmentalists” who have stripped phosphates out of dishwasher soap, making them less efficient. I’ve noticed this, too, although not on my dishes — Mona, it’s called rinsing, try it — but on the insides of the washer itself. Let me tell you how I have harnessed that old conservative value — pulling up my socks and figuring it out for myself — to cope with these modern, liberal-imposed inconveniences.

The washer took some getting used to, once our old top-loader died. The new ones are all front-loaders and use less water than the old ones — I’d estimate at least two-thirds less, maybe more. You also use far less soap. Which means you can wash in as much hot water as you like, as you’re only using a couple gallons. This fixes the doesn’t-wash-well problem. My ninja skills in advanced laundry technologies — oxy cleaners, bleach pens and the like — take care of the rest.

(My complaint is that the 90-degree rotation of the tub means heavy items are a big pain in the ass. I’ve stopped trying to wash things like bathroom rugs or pillows. I just deal.)

The dishwasher? I discovered a product called Dishwasher Magic at Lowe’s. Once or twice a year, I run it through the ol’ Whirlpool. Strips away all residue and leaves everything sparkling, like the way it used to be when we poured heaps of fully-phosphated Cascade through the thing and let the chips fall where they may.

So, three modern convenience machines ruined by liberals, accommodated through incremental adjustment in habit and behavior. How. Easy. Meanwhile, consider that some conservatives believe all law-abiding citizens should be packing heat at all times, and buying a couple bottles of Dishwasher Magic seems like pretty easy stuff.

Anyway, back to Prospero’s link, the very first one, from Grist.com. That led me to this page, which explained everything:

The first low flow toilet designs simply changed the tank size, thereby reducing the amount of water used without making any other modifications. These early models had many problems and often became clogged or required two flushes to adequately remove waste. These issues frustrated homeowners, making them reluctant to purchase the new toilets. They repaired their old ones or purchased used models instead. These complications prompted manufacturers to make modifications and improve their low flow toilet models. Most currently available models work in a comparable fashion to older pre-1994 designs.

In other words, a government policy pushed innovation. I thought that never happened.

I can’t believe I’ve just spend 803 words talking about housework. Well, one of my many jobs is that of homemaker. I have room in my brain for laundry, too.

But now the hour is growing late, and I must get to work. Some bloggage? Sure:

You’ll never guess how one Washington D.C. miracle school achieved that sharp increase in test scores:

A USA TODAY investigation, based on documents and data secured under D.C.’s Freedom of Information Act, found that for the past three school years most of Noyes’ classrooms had extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.

It’s still freezing here, just miserable, but the icebreakers are at work on our part of the Great Lakes. Skip the story, watch the video and photo galleries.

And another video from the other Detroit paper — the people who love the Packard Plant and why they go there. It’s pretty much what you expect, but some arresting images.

So, see ya, then. And let’s hope for a warmer week ahead, eh?

The Russian textbook I use is the same one my teacher used as a college student at Indiana University, c. 1960-something. The pattern sentences and reading describe not Russia but the Soviet Union, rich with nostalgia for anyone who lived through the Cold War. Everyone is always going from the library to the university, attending ochin interyesny lectzy or perhaps a zacyedanieh klooba, playing shakmatii or going to see “Lyebedinoye Ozero” at the Bolshoi. (Very interesting lectures, club meetings, chess and “Swan Lake,” for you Yanks.)

This week’s reading was about an Amerikanskii, Bob Cook, whose name transliterates amusingly as Kook, who visited Leningrad and stayed at the historic Astoria Hotel. Very nice, but very expensive, Kook tells his studentskii kloob. I’ll say. If I’m reading their website correctly, a deluxe room, double plus twin, perfect for our family when we travel, is 36,000 rubles per night, or — gasp! — $1,275. Don’t forget the 18 percent VAT, too, and buffet breakfast at $58 per person. I guess if I ever get there, it’ll be your basic Soviet-era concrete block guest house for the Derringers.

At this point we stopped the lesson and discussed the siege of Leningrad during World War II, one of history’s great stories of cruelty and endurance. Adolf Hitler planned to take the city, burn it to the ground, raze what couldn’t be burned and rename the city Adolfsburg. He planned to hold his victory party at the Astoria, and even printed invitations. Alas, Joseph Stalin had other plans, and the blockade and siege lasted 900 days. The dead numbered 1.5 million, most from starvation. Sydney, my teacher, met a woman who lived through it, who said they stripped the wallpaper in their home and and scraped off the paste to eat. The bread ration, given to only a few, was mostly sawdust. They ate rats on the street, their beloved pets, each other — cannibalism was common.

But in the end, Leningrad was spared, and today we can all visit the Hermitage, if we can afford to get there. Kook then traveled to Moscow, and we looked at photos of Krassny Ploschad — Red Square — and I wondered if I ever will get to see Lenin’s Tomb with my own eyes, lying in his own red square on Red Square. One of these days. By the way, the old Soviet version of Bloomingdale’s, GUM, which translates roughly to Universal Government Store, is now a shopping mall. Super-expensive in the New Russian style, konyechno. Here’s a joke about the New Russian style:

Boris Nikolayevich is walking down the street when he runs into his friend Andrei Ivanovich. “That’s a lovely tie,” Boris Nikolayevich tells his friend. “Thank you,” says Andrei Ivanovich. “I spent $900 on it in Paris.” To which Boris Nikolayevich replies: “You fool! You could have stayed in Moscow and paid $2,000.”

As you can tell, today I am empty of thought. Every time I open the newspaper, I scowl and think, what the hell are we doing in Libya?, but there are occasional amusements, like this. Apparently $P went to Israel and forgot to check a map:

Bethlehem was supposed to be her first stop of the day, according to a leaked copy of her schedule. But, after an uneventful drive from her hotel in nearby Jerusalem, her car stopped just short of the main Israeli military checkpoint outside Bethlehem, a Palestinian city in the West Bank, appeared to hesitate and then performed a u-turn.

Israeli military officials declined to comment on why Mrs Palin may have turned back, but the country’s defence ministry confirmed that she had made no formal request to visit the occupied West Bank – standard protocol for any foreign dignitary.

Oops.

You know you’re a joke when a business weekly makes fun of you. Congratulations, Hoosier tea partiers.

The Free Press informs me I’m paying the highest auto-insurance rates in the country. No surprise there — I just came through the six-month premium season here at NN.c Central, otherwise known six weeks in the Po’ House, but these numbers are stinky. A prototypical 40-year-old man with a clean driving record pays $2,541 a year? What does he drive, an Escalade with spinners? We pay about $2,000 a year for two cars and two drivers.

CNN beats up on Fox. For once.

Off to the showers for me. Have a great day.

For a few months now, Kate has been playing in a band with a couple of her girlfriends. The three of them take a rock-band class at a local music school — and let me just tell you, all the music schools in the country owe a big debt to Jack Black for that whole “school of rock” idea — and that’s where they found their drummer, Scott. Together, they are Po. Named for the Teletubby. They were nameless for a long time, until one day when Alan was cleaning the basement and came across Kate’s old talking Po doll. He started to put it in the bin for the Goodwill and must have squeezed her sensor, because she said, “Goodbye!” He took this as a sign we should keep it, and name the band after her. After a while, Kate agreed. If they’re still together when they’re a little older, they can tell people they’re named for Edgar Allen. Or for their parents’ financial state after paying for their music lessons and instruments.

At first I thought the idea of a guided group lesson/practice ran counter to the idea of rock ‘n’ roll, but changed my mind. Their teachers have been great; last week their regular guy was sick, and his sub got Kate and Haley, bass and lead respectively, improvising and sounding like REM.

But mostly they play covers of songs they like, and Saturday was their first real gig, at a local church’s battle of the bands. It was a marathon event, as the lineup indicates, and Po played very early on, not the best spot by a long shot, even when the crowd isn’t drinking. I think this placement was deliberate; they were the youngest band there, the only one whose members were still in middle school. But someone has to warm the crowd up, and that was the straw they drew.

Not only was the event itself hours and hours, setup and preparation took most of the day. Our part wasn’t auspicious; arriving early for setup, Alan found the church locked and no one answering the door. He rapped once, then rapped again, harder. And broke the glass on the door:

“Who puts window glass on a door?” he fumed later, displaying his cut finger. “That has to be a code violation.”

Finally the minister came, having perhaps heard the glass break. Alan offered profuse apologies, his billing address, etc. A ceiling tile was taped over the hole, the amps shlepped downstairs — because these things are always in church basements, aren’t they? — and Alan came home for dinner with me and his sister, leaving Kate to the church-basement pre-show pizza party in the embrace of her peers.

We returned and paid for our tickets. I told them to keep the change for Japanese earthquake relief, but didn’t mention the window. Good karma! Pay it forward! Etcetera.

Showtime:

They sounded pretty good for a bunch of 14-year-olds. They have some work to do on their stage presence, but that will come in time. Before she left, I asked Kate what she planned to wear. She shrugged and said, “What I have on?”

“Don’t you have any leather chaps?” I asked to a look of horror. She never gets when I’m joking. I told her to find something black, so that’s what she did. Her new red hair looked great under the lights. And someday, I’ll sell this picture to Rolling Stone:

They didn’t place, although their early spot gave them hours to shamelessly work their social networks and grab the Fan’s Choice award. That’s what social networks are for, and is to be expected when you put your poll on Facebook.

I often encourage them to stretch a little, maybe cover some Ramones or “Barbie Eat a Sandwich” or whatever, but as Jack Black reminds us, rock ‘n’ roll means stickin’ it to the man, and in this case, I am the man. You can’t force art.

Have to run today, as usual, but here are a few links for your chewing pleasure:

David Carr on the New York Times paywall:

When I was in Austin, I would fall asleep each night to bad dreams, prompted by cable television ranting that the world was melting down, principally in Japan. And each morning I would wake up to reporting that described in very careful detail what was actually known, not feared, about the nuclear crisis in Japan. Throughout the day, I checked my news alerts to make sure the world was not ending imminently. Tellingly, I never picked up a copy of the newspaper, reading it on the new iPad where The Times is a living thing and the better for it.

People, real actual people, went and reported that information, some of it at personal peril and certainly at gigantic institutional expense. So The Times is turning toward its customers to bear some of the cost. The Times is hardly alone: AFP, Reuters, The Associated Press, Dow Jones, the BBC and NPR are all part of a muscular journalistic ecosystem. But it seems an odd time to argue against a business initiative that aims at keeping boots on the ground during a time of global upheaval.

Yes, exactly.

Mich-centric: Today is the day the governor unveils his plan to make local governments more efficient through a carrot-stick approach. This will be interesting to watch. I suspect there will be many, many bad bunnies around here who will not get their carrots.

I don’t know how you feel about Elizabeth Warren, but I think she’s pretty nifty. A little Warren love here and here, which you should read quick, before the paywall goes up.

Me, I have to run.

I don’t normally make a fuss about birthdays here, but what the hell, today is the 50th birthday of one of our most loyal, regular and respectful commenters, so let’s make one. Happy birthday, Brian Stouder. I mean: Happy birthday, Brian Stouder!

Mercy, I’m late today. That’s what happens when you put your work-work ahead of your fun-work. This is spring break for Wayne State, which I thought would be an easy one for me, but instead I found myself at two different city council meetings, and while it was in no way enjoyable, it was probably a good thing for me, as it’s easy to forget what you’re asking your students to do on a week-to-week basis.

I’m all for town-hall government, but there were times this week that I yearned to be my old colleague Andrew Jarosh, who was apparently the de facto timekeeper at Fort Wayne City Council meetings for years. I didn’t know this until I talked to someone who attended one to make a presentation.

“If someone is talking and wanders off point, Andrew catches the clerk’s eye and taps his watch,” he said. The clerk would then remind the speaker of the time limit. This apparently happened several times in a single meeting. I thought it was merely funny at the time, but now that I’m inflicting these things upon myself, I see it as nothing short of an act of heroism for everyone who wants to get out the door before 9 p.m., and preferably 8:30, and even better, 8 on the dot.

I actually tried the watch-tap on Monday, but the person whose eye I caught has no power to move things along.

What is it about a podium that makes some people believe they’re in a Norman Rockwell painting, or maybe wearing a toga and orating in Latin? It’s like a letter to the editor, only live. I think I’ve mentioned before that the letters column in most newspapers is the only thing that can make otherwise reasonable people use phrases like “I think not.”

So that’s what I did this morning instead of blogging: Parsed a liquor-license hearing for the readers of my other site. Liquor laws are never simple, alas. Most people don’t understand how much government is involved in crafting the streetscapes they experience every day, and how much is left to the invisible hand. The various social networks I’m connected to have lately featured local people offering their opinions on what “should” fill a recently vacated retail space, what “they” should get to go there. Patience I have for these discussions: Approaching zero, unless I need to tone my eye-roll muscles. People throw any number of daft ideas on the table. So far no one’s suggested a dog massage parlor, but that’s about the only thing left out.

Tomorrow is Me Time, then. I’ve been trying to find time to edit a video I shot last fall. Maybe I’ll find the time. Likely I won’t.

In the meantime, any bloggage?

Just posted on the last thread: The latest Ponzi schemer, arrested in California, was a big fan of the GOP in general and Mitch Daniels in particular.

What does Tina Fey have to promote this month? I agree with every word Tom & Lorenzo say about this unfortunate magazine cover.

Oh, and it’s St. Patrick’s Day. I’m not the least bit Irish, unfortunately. My friend Emma Downs is, however, and just posted on Facebook that her sister Nancy was named for this song, so I guess, just for today, I’ll claim it, too:

I got my paczki yesterday, in a distinctly un-Polish bakery down the main drag from my house. They’re as French as ooh-la-la, but if everybody’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, everybody’s Polish on Paczki Day, at least in Detroit. So I had one raspberry-filled paczek for lunch, and spent a couple of hours riding the sugar high at a reporting assignment, which ended in guffaws with a couple of real-estate agents. You think cops see a lot? Real-estate agents see everything, and what they don’t see, they hear.

“Someone called our office looking for 30 acres up north to grow medical marijuana,” one said.

“I saw an MLS photo once where someone left their artificial penis on the bathroom counter,” replied the other. I wonder if she said “artificial penis” because it sounds better than “dildo,” the way “handyman special” is an improvement on “a real dump.” She reads this blog, so hey, welcome! You know what she said about it? “You have such smart readers.” You bet I do.

I wondered if I could find the MLS photo of the artificial penis. I figure it has to be on a blog somewhere, so I Googled around a bit. Didn’t find it, but I did find this, via this page, which is another one of those places you should avoid if you don’t have about five hours to kill.

And now it’s Wednesday, when the week shifts into another gear. Office hours this week, so I have to get moving in about six minutes. Fortunately, we are bloggage-heavy today:

Ke$ha, the pop star who makes Madonna look like Maria Callas, has an unusual deal with LifeStyles condoms. Well, I wouldn’t touch her without a pair of gloves on.

This story broke yesterday morning and was updated through the day — a woman rushing to the hospital ended up giving birth in a car, pulled over on the shoulder of I-94. When it first appeared, that was about all the detail available, and the racist, vile comments started to pile up so fast the staff couldn’t delete them fast enough — another welfare recipient comes into the world in a rusty Pontiac with the muffler wired on, etc. At one point the story said 50 comments had been made, but you could only read about 10; the new Gannett website is whack and I’m not sure how it works, but I think the other 40 had been deleted, and the counter hadn’t caught up.

Then about noon a fuller story was posted. The woman is married. To a doctor, who wasn’t with her because he’s doing his residency in New Jersey. And she’s Muslim. She had the guts to allow photography, although of course she was fully covered in the usual fashion. Cute baby, proud mother, married parents, what’s the problem? The comments took a turn from welfare and wired-on mufflers to terrorism and cracks about honor killings (“I sure hope the EMS “guys” were all female. Otherwise, this woman is in big trouble.”). If I worked for a newspaper nowadays, I’d find it hard to concentrate on anything other than hating my readers.

But not everyone in the world is awful, and that’s why we close with this wonderful short essay about who helps you when you need it. May I just say, nothing in this story surprised me one bit. “Today you, tomorrow me.” It washes a lot of rancid comments away.

Remember, one day we’ll all be dust. The important part is what we did beforehand.

I had to keep checking the top of this story, so sure was I that I knew the author. The byline says Benjamin J. Dueholm, but I could have sworn it read Mild-Mannered Jeff.

It’s a thoughtful look at the work of Dan Savage, the alt-weekly sex columnist, who in recent years has branched out from refereeing bedroom disagreements to offering broader advice on what constitutes an ethical life. The premise of the story is that Savage has become an ethicist for the modern American age, in which no one is surprised (or should be) by sexual behavior, but is struggling to fit our new understanding into old frameworks. Here’s the nut, to this editor’s eye:

Half my mail at ‘Savage Love’ is from straight men and women who want to be reassured that their kinks—from BDSM to cross-dressing to fucking animals (!)—are normal,” Savage wrote in 2007, echoing a note of exasperation he has sounded a few times over the years. Savage has made clear he is not primarily interested in adjudicating whether people’s bedroom proclivities lie on the safe side of normality. …For him, what’s most important is that abandonment of inhibition should never entail an abandonment of personal responsibility.

That’s what makes him the right man for the job. Leave kinks aside for the moment. (Please.) Just as medical technology gallops ahead of our moral and ethical structures — does the surrogate mother get a card on the first Sunday in May? does the sperm donor owe anything to the children he helped create? — so too has our own behavior. Most adults with a functioning brain have figured out who the real beneficiaries of female virginity-until-marriage were, what’s really behind homophobia, but they’re uncomfortable with throwing all restraint out the window. Savage looks for an underlayment of basic human decency:

In ways that his frequent interlocutors on the Christian right wouldn’t expect, Savage has probably done more to uphold conventional families than many counselors who are unwilling to engage so frankly with modern sexual mores. “A successful marriage is basically an endless cycle of wrongs committed, apologies offered, and forgiveness granted,” he advised one very uptight spouse, “all leavened by the occasional orgasm.”

The reason I mention MMJeff is because it turns out the writer is a Lutheran minister. (Not that I would *ever* confuse Jeff with a Lutheran, perish the thought! It just had a certain clerical tone.) And he gets to my misgivings about Savage lower in the piece:

If there is something to treasure in the old, traumatized ideal of lifelong monogamy, it’s not that it demeans sexual fulfillment. Rather, it’s that monogamy integrates sexual fulfillment with the other good things in life—having someone to pay bills and raise children with, having a refuge both emotional and physical from the rest of the world. It is an ideal that is powerful even when it is not fully realized (as it rarely, if ever, is), not a contract voided by nonperformance. A worldview in which sex is so central to life that it may be detached from everything else and sought apart from every other ingredient of happiness presumes a world in which happiness itself can be redefined—in which people can be retrained in what they expect and accept from one another. To approach the libertarian ideal of human relationships, emotional shock therapy of the sort contemplated by AHND will be required. The promised land of natural, ethical, autonomous sexuality lies across a desert of self-mortifying trade-offs between sexual fulfillment and all the other joys and comforts of life.

Well-said. And that’s enough quoting from the copyright for one day. Worth your time.

What a day yesterday was. I spend a couple hours of Monday morning going around to our police stations, checking the blotters for GrossePointeToday.com’s public-safety report, easily the most popular feature of our site. And may I just say, all it takes is about a month of that to disabuse a person of any fantasies she might have had about living with a better class of people. (For the record, I never had any in the first place.) Most don’t make the roundup, as I define “public safety” as that which affects the safety of the public as a whole, but occasionally I’ll throw a domestic assault in, particularly if a weapon is involved. My favorite of this week was a woman who reported a “belated” assault, i.e., one that happened sometime before she sobered up and realized someone had punched her on the chin. The report described two black eyes, but noted those were from plastic surgery she underwent sometime before she went drinking and ran into an old boyfriend, her presumed assailant, although she wasn’t sure, because she couldn’t really remember anything. Some people live exciting lives, but mostly they lead drunken ones. Take alcohol out of the world, and people would find fewer reasons to beat up on one another. I’m sure we’d find another excuse pronto, however.

My second-favorite: A three-year-old boy found wandering near a major intersection, a full three blocks from his home. He’d been turned out into the yard by one of the adults in his short but unfortunate life, who was allegedly watching him from inside and couldn’t imagine how he’d gotten out, although, said adult noted, this was the fourth time he’d done so. “He’s a runner,” another caretaker reported. Can’t hardly blame the kid. I’d run, too.

Please note that I’m using “favorite” ironically here. Man hands on misery to man, etc.

Yeesh, it’s getting late. Best hop out of here before the day slips away. It’s Fat Tuesday — Paczki Day here in Detroit. I might stop somewhere around here for one later, although it’s decidedly not part of my diet at the moment. Wherever you are, I hope Mardi Gras finds you.

Friday’s workout didn’t go well. Running on fumes, I felt the way Hunter Thompson described himself in “Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas” — much inappropriate sweating. Yes, you’re supposed to sweat while you exercise, but not this much. Went home, showered, ran this errand and that, couldn’t regulate my thermostat, caught a chill. And then, Saturday morning, it was official: Sick. Oh, well. It’s been stalking me all winter; might as well get it over with.

At least it happened on a weekend. I had planned to go to Eastern Market, maybe call a friend for lunch, walk the Dequindre Cut and hope for spring. Instead I slept and whined and slept and finished Major Pettigrew. By late afternoon, I felt better, well enough to rise and grocery shop and blah blah blah, but I’m cautiously optimistic this may have been a 24-hour thing. One day of having one’s clock cleaned, rather than the two-week cold so many of you have been struggling with? I’ll take it.

Among the other things we had to take on Saturday — heavy rains (would have washed out any recreational stroll) followed by snow. Another two inches. Sigh. I think I bear up under winter’s assault like a trouper, but by March I’m thinking about crocuses and daffodils. A gardener once told me to plant peas on St. Patrick’s Day. Are you kidding me? It was a good day to stay in bed.

Major Pettigrew was an absolute joy, by the way. I’m looking forward to the book-club discussion Friday.

Which seems as good a transition as any into the iPad. Unlike many Appleheads, I don’t spring for every new gadget that comes along, but it seems I spring for quite a lot of them, eventually. In the world of Appleheads, this represents enormous restraint. I’m still hanging onto by nearly three-year-old iPhone with no plans for an upgrade, but the new iPad is sorely tempting me. It seems like so much machine for a mere five bills, and I can think of a million places I would use it, rather than shlep my laptop around. I figure it’s only a matter of time, which then raises the question of e-books. I don’t want to go all Andy Rooney here — he already did — but it seems these will be inevitable, and I might as well get with the program. As I always embrace technology with ambivalence, I expect my e-book collection will be as whack as my MP3 collection, which started out being strictly upbeat workout music and oddities I might throw into a home movie soundtrack, and now is, frankly, an embarrassment. I don’t want to wipe out on my bike and have the EMTs pluck the earbuds from my cooling ears to hear “Brand New Key.” But, in that strange way that the delivery device always changes that which it delivers, so too will e-readers change publishing. I had coffee with an author friend the other day, who reported that her author friends, the ones who write niche products like spanking stories and other erotica, are enjoying a boom in sales. You can hide anything in a Kindle, it seems.

And as I recall, another author friend says the Kindle is great for hot new books you want to read in, but not necessarily read through — think “Game Change” and other texts-between-covers that really should be long magazine articles. For ten bucks, you can Kindle ’em, scan ’em and forget ’em. Lots of magazines cost five bucks these days; is that so much more?

Do you sense I am trying to talk myself into something here?

Maybe Connie or one of you librarians can enlighten me: How does e-pub work in lending? How do you “borrow” an e-book? Do you get a time-limited license that expires after two weeks? What are the copyright protections like, or do we now expect authors to write free, too?

Manic Monday, so let’s go bloggage-ing:

We’re No. 1! My very own congressional district — Michigan 13 — was at the absolute bottom of the heap in this fascinating but irritatingly vague map of “the nation’s well-being.” How did yours do?

Planning for life after Glenn Beck, on Fox.

Echoing Gene Weingarten: A fart joke in Dennis the Menace! (And, as he points out, you shoulda seen the first draft.)

Gotta run. Enjoy Monday, all.

Breakfast: One scrambled egg, some of last night’s leftover oven-roasted potatoes with garlic, one tablespoon of salsa, all wrapped in a tortilla. The black-coffee portion of the meal is still in progress, but I hereby pronounce this breakfast an unqualified success.

Protein at every meal is my goal for the spring. Lately I’ve been corresponding with an urban farmer who lives a couple miles from me, on the other side of Mack Avenue (i.e., Detroit) and keeps a flock of ducks. She sells fresh duck eggs whenever you feel like stopping by, for 50 cents apiece. My bravery in all things culinary wavers a bit here. My reading tells me they taste the same as the chicken variety, with more nutrients; is this true? I never ate eggs until I was in college, when a boyfriend who had been a grill chef at Perkins introduced me to western omelets. I think I’ve been a trouper since then, but there are two kinds of people in the world — those whose breakfasts run to fruit-yogurt-juice and those who are eggs-meat-potatoes, and I’m in the first camp. Eggs are for lunch.

I’m going to get some duck eggs, although mostly I just want to see her flock. There are so many urban farmers in Detroit now it’s no longer a novelty, but I love animals and I love ducks. Jim at Sweet Juniper has friends deeper in the city who keep goats and chickens, and there’s a high school for girls who have children — do we even bother to call them unwed mothers anymore? — that has at least one horse, along with a garden plot that earns them real money. Parts of the city look like rural Mississippi during the Depression, only with curbs. Crazy town.

Speaking of protein, the Free Press has gone so Gannett of late that I’ve practically stopped reading it, but this story caught my eye today — about scientific research on underwater rock formations in Lake Huron, concentrating on a now-submerged land bridge that arcs across the lake between Alpena, Michigan and Amberley, Ontario. Scientists suspect the formations were man-made, and served as Ice Age caribou hunting blinds. Imagine what it took to bring down a caribou with the tools of the era. Alley Oop, you have my respect.

Meanwhile, the graphic with the story has a big boo-boo in it, describing the land bridge as 10 feet wide. No. Ten miles. Details, details.

Years ago I read a story about some ancient human remains found in the Pacific Northwest — Something Man — that are unmistakably Caucasian in nature, challenging the belief that Indians were the first to migrate into North America across the Bering land bridge. The remains were being fought over, with Indians wanting to reclaim them for reburial, and the scientific community, which wants to study them more and maybe recast some theories. The story broke down the sides into approximate camps, with the most troublesome being, essentially, Indian religious fundamentalists, who didn’t want the corpse studied at all, because their version of history is the only one they accept — that they’ve always been there, that they were the first ones there, and the rest of you just shut up. The piece included the comments of a prominent Native American mocking the whole idea of the Bering land bridge, finding it a little too conveeeenient, this idea that the ocean was once dry in a particular place. I guess he’s an Indian fundamentalist, but for my money, I’d rather imagine that land bridge arcing across the lake with its caribou blinds, and the desperate search for protein and nutrition that only required me to consult my refrigerator this morning.

So, bloggage?

Change the names, it’s all the same — lunatic known for his bullhorn protests at something called the Southern Decadence Festival is busted jerking off in a public park.

More $P sockpuppetry. This just gets funnier by the day.

The best picture on the Internet, via the WashPost’s Style Tumblr. Related (to protein and Internet pictures, which brings us full circle): Al Qaeda attacks America with photo of piglet wearing boots. Via the Onion News Network, natch.

I’m off, all.

I think this explains why we bought a noisy, polluting machine to clear our driveway. Just to give y’all a sense of what we were facing this morning…