Last week the roof project finally concluded with a little mop-up: A guy came out to rehang the back-side gutters and install a couple more downspouts. Now our brand-new roof will shed water efficiently. I pause to stick my finger in my cheek for a weak pop, and then I wave it in the air and say woo. Big effin’ deal.

This is new for me. In the past, I had pride of ownership in almost every repair we made, to this house and to our last house. There’s something about caring well for one’s house that’s always resonated with me, but not so much anymore. It’s true that a new roof doesn’t satisfy like a new kitchen, but it still felt virtuous, because you were adding to your home’s resale value and maintaining the property, which reflected on the neighborhood and made everyone rest a little easier at night.

But our real estate market can be explained in a headline which I swear I’ve read 400 times in the last five years in the local weekly: Has the market hit bottom? The answer is always the same: Maybe. The answer is always wrong, because the correct answer is: No. So putting a roof on my house, which used to feel like forgoing a new dress to put the money in the bank, now feels more like tearing up hundred-dollar bills and throwing them into a flushing toilet. And as long as we’re reading the Obvious News, it seems I have lots of company.

When this recession is over — if it ever is — and the historians start to sort it out, I don’t think anything will be as important, in the long run, as what it did to real estate. It’s still my main disappointment with Barack Obama, that he didn’t launch a big show trial on Jan. 21, 2009 that would have marched the Wall Street shitheads who wrecked the housing market before a tribunal of foreclosed and washed-out homeowners and a judge that was a combination of, ohhhh, Al Sharpton and Judge Judy, say. His gavel would be oversized, and he’d be welcome to use it on both his bench and the defendants’ heads. A guillotine would be right outside the courtroom, and we’d use it until the rope broke and the blade dulled.

That, at least, would show we take the damage these people did seriously. People who don’t own houses or apartments get a little impatient with this, and I guess I don’t blame them, but trust me: This crash hurts everyone, owner or not. For those of us who don’t live in the places where the middle class are shut out of owning real estate — which is to say, most of the country outside of New York City, San Francisco and much (but not all) of Los Angeles — our houses are the most expensive thing we own, and are far more than a place to lay our weary heads and store our record collections. The sale of my parents’ house provided half their retirement stake. They were of the generation that saved up for a down payment, shopped carefully, bought and stayed put. No flipping or trading up for them. Three bedrooms, 1.5 baths, bought in 1962 and sold in 1995, paid off and worth seven times what they paid for it.

My generation was different, but not Alan and me, so much. This is our second house, in our second city. I pay extra principal on our house every month, although God knows why. Optimistically, it’s worth half what we paid for it. Recovery of our purchase price might be 20 years off. The Detroit Metro has special problems, to be sure, but the whole country is sweeping up this wreckage, and I will never forget who caused it. (Hint: It wasn’t Barney Frank.)

For years, for practically ever, real estate was the safest investment you could make. My mom started bugging me to buy a condo as soon as I had a full-time job. You couldn’t lose. Everybody pays something for housing, after all, and you might as well pay yourself, plus the mortgage interest is tax-deductible. And housing always went up. It didn’t rise at the redonkulous rates of recent years, but a steady 1 to 3 percent was a given.

And while I may be overstating the virtues of ownership, I still firmly believe that a neighborhood of owners is, in the broadest terms, better than one of renters. When you have a financial stake in something, you pay more attention to it. You care if the local schools are good, even if you don’t have children in them. You don’t like it when your neighbors let their lawn go to prairie (unless everyone else’s is prairie, too). You keep the walks swept. It’s the broken-window theory on a less dramatic scale, and for generations, it worked.

But that’s only part of it. Local governments rely on property-tax revenues to provide services. When property values slide, so do tax receipts. We’re only beginning to see these problems, cities letting streets go or not replacing lighting or laying off firefighters. And how long did I say it might be before recovery?

When you think about it, pretty much everything in our economy is predicated on the idea that we’ll always be growing. (Certainly our health-care costs have done that.) A few flat years we can handle. But a full-on retreat, a crash? This is new for me. Last week our boring old city council got a little testy over some penny-ante travel for the city clerk, nothing big, but one of the members grumped that they were looking at another enormous shortfall the following year, and nickels and dimes add up. I can’t imagine what they’ll be fighting over in three years. Probably which one gets to quit first.

My house, my millstone. But with a nice new roof.

So, a little bloggage? Sure. Scott Rosenberg at Salon looks at a phenomenon I’ve been seeing in my news searching for a while now: The content farms have gamed Google. Don’t be evil!

“I think his dad’s bought them off, sometimes. He’s practically selling dope out of the trunk of his car. I have to give him one thing, though. Watching his personality disintegrate made me give up pot for good. Well, that and the fact the shit makes you so fucking retarded these days. The last time I smoked was spring last year. I was so paranoid I walked out of the house and hid in that big wall of shrubs by the sorority house. And the girls started that goddamn singing. ‘Together forever. Together forever.’ Do you have any idea how much that sounds like you’re eavesdropping on some kind of blood sacrifice?” — why I added Coozledad’s blog to my RSS feed. I was missing too many of these, or discovering them days later.

Another great Tom-and-Lorenzo Mad Style entry, this one on Francine Hanson, played by the sublime Anne Dudek.

I’ve taken a casual interest in Stephanie Seymour ever since Alan and I discovered the “November Rain” video on MTV. One of us would always say to the other, “She dies in the end.” Today, the NYT did a silly-season Sunday Styles front on the disintegration of her marriage to Peter Brant, described as “a taller, more dashing version of Buddy Hackett.” Her “November Rain” role was described thusly: “she portrayed a bride who dies.” Everyone remembers her!

So have a great Monday, all. Mine will, as usual, be busy.

The bike ride yesterday disappointed, but only a little. No Fabulous Hollywood Stars were in evidence down at South High, but apparently they have been; Miley Cyrus spottings are making my “grosse pointe” RSS feed fill like a bucket. Yesterday it was basically your average film set, as seen from beyond the security line, which is to say, a bunch of trailers. You could get a similar thrill at your local KOA campground.

Well, I hope she’s enjoying herself. The Free Press had a story that said she asked some fans at the local CVS to back off and let her buy her chips in peace. I don’t believe this story for a minute. Nobody that thin and pretty eats chips of any sort, and if they do, they have lackeys buy them.

Of course I didn’t see her. I never see the famous person. I have written about this before. I’d link, but I couldn’t find it in two Googles, so pfft. I am the anti-LA Mary. By the time I arrive at the party, it’s over. After I leave, it starts. My friends were wandering through the Ohio State Fair one afternoon and ducked into the Warner Cable tent. Guess who else had ducked in to play an impromptu set, just because he liked the interactive QUBE system? Todd Rundgren! I was not there. I sat in the bar when Elvis Costello traded blows, physical ones, with Bonnie Bramlett in the bar across the street. Where I wasn’t. Another night, at another bar, I left early because I had to work the next day. An hour after I went home, Prince showed up. Played a few numbers. Argh.

Once I was at the video post-production house waiting on my friend Mark to get off work. While I stood reading a bulletin board, David Lee Roth squeezed past, behind me. Brushed up against me and everything. Didn’t feel it, didn’t know about it until someone pointed it out later. That must have been some bulletin board.

Last summer, the local papers contained a funny story, about a Grosse Pointe woman who was sitting in a restaurant, looking at the man across the way. She’s one of those women who knows everyone, and she knew she knew this man, but she couldn’t think of his name. Oh, well, time to get reacquainted. She walked across the room, stuck out her hand and said, “Hi, I’m Muffy McPrepster.” He shook her hand and said, “Hi, I’m Robert DeNiro.”

Needless to say, I was not there. (DeNiro was shooting “Stone,” coming soon to a theater near you.)

I won’t ride my bike down that way today. I expect Miley and Demi will be working the rope line.

We’ve been a shallow puddle of late, eh? Sorry, but it’s been hot and miserable, and I’ve been catching up on this and that. I’m teaching again this fall, for reals and for money and everything, and I need to get my affairs in order, which means learning Blackboard, the system everybody uses and expects me to use, too. I’m baffled by little on the internet, and I thought Blackboard was clipping right along the last time I tried to use it, but nobody could see my posts and my e-mail wasn’t getting through, and grr. One of my colleagues suggested that I may well have been doing everything right, and that “it wasn’t appearing on Blackboard” is the “dog ate my homework” of the 21st century. Well, this time I will attain mastery. This time that one won’t work with me.

So let’s skip to the bloggage:

In the Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Dumb Tree Department, meet Ben Quayle. He is not Brock Landers, dammit, but you know what? I think the dog ate that man’s homework.

Dear Ms. Schlessinger (sorry, AP style forbids me from using the “Dr.” honorific for a PhD), perhaps you are baffled this morning (although I doubt it), withering under the angry glare of those who would call you racist just because you used the word “nigger” 11 times on your stupid radio show the other day, all while in the course of telling a black woman she was overly sensitive for objecting to the use of the word by her husband’s white friends, because some comedians on HBO use it all the time, and so obviously that lady just lacks the sense of humor required for an interracial relationship. Or perhaps you aren’t. I suspect you’re reading your heaps of fan mail, and are simply grateful that someone, anyone is paying attention to you, however briefly. (Here in Detroit, your show plays in the coveted middle-of-the-night time slot.) Watching this brief video clip may help explain things to you. Although I doubt it.

Ayn Rand on the playground. Funny.

And I’m off to take the last, seriously-this-is-it, really-I-mean-it bite of my horse-eating project. Seriously. LAST BITE. Here comes the airplane, open the hangar doors.

It didn’t take Vladimir Putin to resurrect the Soviet cultural experience. We have it right here in the Metro:

Just another day at the Comcast service center. We were picking up some boxes that would enable our secondary TVs can get more than four channels. Or something. On the Indiana BMV Scale of Existential Misery, it didn’t rate very high — there was a Tigers game on for the line’s viewing pleasure, and I had my phone. And even without it, I’m not a terrible waiter. Those who cannot spend an idle 30 minutes without climbing the walls lack inner resources. I have inner resources in spades (it’s why my butt is so big).

I felt worse for the workers, who toiled inside a bulletproof fortress worthy of a Detroit liquor store. I understand people hate their cable company, and I understand the equipment has some value, but it seemed like overkill for Warren. Note, also, the chartreuse walls of the inner sanctum. Multiply by 40 hours a week. I’d be deploying the escape chute by Tuesday.

Afterward, it seemed time for lunch, and Alan had a suggestion: Lazybones Smokehouse, the best barbecue shack you never heard of. Plunked in a depressing stretch of an ugly road in Roseville, surrounded by machine shops and other places filled with men who think “cilantro” is the dance that took Pam Anderson out of “Dancing With the Stars,” it has the distinction, Alan says, of being “a restaurant where I’ve never seen a woman customer.” OK, happy to be a rarity, then. The building stands out from the gray landscape with a mural featuring pigs pitching horseshoes while cows and chickens watch. It features…where do I start? Every meat you can think of, seven kinds of sauce, combos that either make you smile (“The Hog Trough,” your choice of four meats atop a mountain of fries) or wince (“The Smokestack Lighting,” chopped burnt ends, applewood bacon, cajun sausage, caramelized onions and cheddar on a hoagie bun), but essentially everything that’s worth barbecuing.

We both ordered pulled-pork sammiches with slaw served Memphis-style, Texas spitfire sauce, then sat down to wait. There are two large tables, where you eat family-style. True to form, the only other eat-in customers were men. Young men. Two were discussing dating. One had a night out planned with a young woman, but he wasn’t hopeful, because she didn’t give good text. I think this was an internet or some other sort of blind fixup, and he was, to my mind, unreasonably fixated on the fact she couldn’t summon up witty repartee in 140 characters or so. I weep to think I brought a young woman into this world, who will have to shop for a husband among these scratch-and-dent specials. One arm was heavily tattooed, although the rest of his outfit suggested an office job, one that requires a plastic ID tag in plain sight (i.e., all of them, these days). Again: I weep.

And that’s the sort of day you have when it’s a million degrees outside and even more humid.

I looked at the Rush Limbaugh wedding album y’all were discussing yesterday. Two takeaways: Mrs. Limbaugh the Fourth has an excellent hairdresser, and an even better plastic surgeon. We see so many bad boob jobs, we forget what a good one looks like, and unless I miss my guess, when that lady goes back to the earth she will leave a pair of silicon bags behind. (See no. 16 in this Gawker photo array). Also, ex-squeeze me? He got a military color guard? Does every 4-F Vietnam-era pussy get that? I guess if the check you write is big enough, but I am appalled. I know, I know: Appalling man is appalling. Still.

Speaking of bad boob jobs, Renee, what were you thinking?

I’ve never been a fan of the Huffington Post. Their steadfast advancement of quackery is a big reason.

Writers have elevated procrastination to a high art. As seen here.

Ha ha ha.

And now I’m gone. Gonna go for a bike ride, damn the humidity. The Miley Cyrus tweeting around here has become deafening, and I want to see if she’s drawn a crowd to her set down in the Farms. Wish me luck. I’m taking a camera.

I feel like I spent half the weekend in the kitchen, but lately the weekend is when I get the chance to do it. There was a birthday party Sunday afternoon, and the host wondered if I’d bring something for dessert. (I’m getting a pie rep with this bunch.) The traditional birthday dessert is cake, however, so, the challenge: Make a birthday cake in high summer-fruit season. This is what I came up with. Behold, Suzanne’s Summer Birthday Cake:

Nothing special: White layers, whipped-cream frosting, fruit atop, fruit between. As I told Alan last week, you really don’t have to be much of a cook at this time of year. You just have to be a good shopper and assembler.

When I finished I boxed up the cake and arrived at the party an hour early. No one was there yet, including the host, although he had thoughtfully left a cooler of beer on ice in the back yard. So I opened one and got in the pool. Weekends are brief enough around here.

When I bought the whipping cream, the bagger at the grocery held up the carton and said, “Is this whipped cream?” I said, “Not yet. But when you pour it into a bowl and get your mixer involved, it will be.” He looked astounded. Poor kid; no doubt the product of a Cool-Whip household. I’m not one of those foodies who sneers at Cool-Whip. It has its place in many delicious things, including my Thanksgiving Waldorf salad. But I’ve had many such encounters in grocery lines, and I always feel sad for kids who can’t tell onions from garlic, let alone the tricky stuff like shallots or fennel. (I once wrote about this in my column, and got a hell-yeah phone call from a man who raved that he’d asked a grocery clerk for a No. 5 can of something, and the clerk didn’t know what he was talking about! Can you believe?! I confessed that actually, I didn’t know the can numbering system, either, and he hung up in disgust, his what-is-the-world-coming-to quota filled for the day. It’s always something, but nowadays we have Google, which explains all.)

It occurred to me on the way to the car — esprit d’escalier, grocery store-style — that I’d missed the opportunity to really blow the kid’s mind by telling him that if you left the mixer running for a while and skipped the sugar, you’d end up with butter. Oh, amazing heavy cream. A sauce base, a cake frosting, a corn-on-the-cob dressing, ass fat — is there anything you cannot be?

Since my weekend’s experiences amounted to so little, let’s skip right to the bloggage, eh?

Reason to be glad you’re not Muslim: Ramadan starts amid yet another week of brutal heat and humidity.

The president shoots hoops with NBA stars, prompting the usual right-wing skrees. I can’t believe he’d step on a court with LeBron James. I wonder if the pros let him win.

Speaking of which, Glenn Beck is now comparing the Obama administration with “Planet of the Apes.” How…innnnteresting.

And one bit of seriousness — how the recession is filtering down to the local-government level. We’ve been very lucky so far in Suburb-land, although I know the last few budget years have been hair-pullers for city managers and councils. At this point the discussions of consolidation of services among the Pointes is just getting started, baby stuff compared to the drastic measures in the article, about shut-off streetlights and shut-down budgets. Anything happening in your town?

As for me, I have 10 million things to do before 3 p.m. See ya.

* Another inside Columbus joke.

And with one breezy-hot day and a few widely scattereds, the heat is banished justlikethat. At least for the next couple of days, we should be able to turn off the A/C and instead listen to the neighbors’ annoying lawn service visits. Fine with me. The first week of August marks the traditional Noticing of the Changing Light for me, which means I’m going to grab at least one fat fashion magazine off a newsstand and start planning my umpteenth fantasy closet.

Fantasy closet is like fantasy football, in which women start with the blank slate of a well-designed empty closet — with lots of attractive, Container Store storage options — and fill it with non-existent clothes we can’t afford but pretend we can. Then we wear them in fantasy-closet dress-up games, perhaps while watching “Project Runway,” in which we are presented with fun outfit ideas like this. (I’m thinking of the topmost one.) “Project Runway” is a genius show, enticing millions of normal-size women to watch novice designers of wildly uneven talent turn out one outfit after another that barely covers one’s ass and, in this case, completely uncovers one’s back. It’s a great fantasy-closet shopping spot, “Project Runway,” because only in fantasies are most women freed of such constrictions as bras and the need to sit down from time to time.

I had about three minutes in my entire life when I could have worn a top like that, which threatens with every step to slip and reveal one’s breasts from either a front or side angle. I was 11 years old.

But, as we’re frequently reminded, runways looks are like concept cars — just an idea. By the time that look finds its way to a store rack, the skirt will be nine inches longer and the top closed on the sides and back, and… it’ll pretty much be an entirely different dress. But that’s OK! Because my fantasy-closet body can totally wear anything at all.

In recent years, I’ve done a lot of my fantasy-closet shopping online or in catalogs. Which is why I’m so thoroughly amused by the website Jezebel, which deserves some sort of fashion Pulitzer for the work they’ve done bringing preposterous photo retouching by fashion retailers to the public’s attention. They made a big splash a few years back with their Redbook cover revelation, but have stayed on the job — along with many others, including the always-amusing Photoshop Disasters.

The current Ann Taylor business is particularly wounding, as Ann is one place that, in general, sells affordable, wearable clothes for a wide range of age and body types. I wore a lot more Ann Taylor when I worked in offices, but I remember it fondly, so knowing they’re playing silly games with extreme photo retouching — removing models’ ribcages seems to be a favorite — really chaps my ass. This isn’t “Project Runway.” I pay real, non-fantasy money for clothes from places like that, and I’d appreciate it if they’d cut that shit out.

I once watched Alan get fitted for a suit, and I was struck by the contrast with shopping for my own clothes. Like nearly everyone, Alan’s body differs from the ideal, and this was treated by the tailor as a simple and utterly unremarkable fact. Take it in here, let it out there, hem it thus, adjust, nip, change, presto, a suit. Whereas women are taught from an early age that their bodies are a collection of “flaws” that must be covered, camouflaged, squeezed in and shaped to fit whatever someone else has decided is this year’s model.

Sooner or later you grow out of this shit, to be sure, but I can’t help but think they’d sell more clothes if they cut it out.

My fantasy closet is shaping up nicely. I bought some fantasy boots, and I’m experimenting with cargo pants and jackets to wear with my non-fantasy scarves. I now own five Hermes scarves; how did that happen? Time to roll out the Joan Holloway all-stars, I think.

So, a lovely weekend awaits. Any bloggage? Not much:

Contrary to popular belief, I cannot read the entire internet every day, and in general I avoid its small stories, for two reasons: a) they’re small; and b) the people who write them have a way of making them seem like Watergate crossed with the Hindenburg explosion (“we can now exclusively reveal…”). But this one, about some clown who’s been writing for Andrew Breitbart on the Shirley Sherrod story, caught my eye, mainly because the clown in question is a Wayne State graduate, although who knows? That could be another part of his inflated resume, along with this amuse-bouche:

A government official once claimed that Dr. Pezzi achieved the highest score ever attained on an IQ test administered nationwide, although Pezzi dismisses this as disingenuous pandering.

Anyway, it appears this genius is practicing medicine somewhere in northern Michigan. Beware, tourists!

Anything else? I got nothin’. Weekend, sweep me into your arms. I’m ready.

Perhaps you wonder what the glamorous life of a blogger is like. Perhaps you wonder how I come up with the many fascinating topics I poke at like a dissected frog five days a week in this space. Perhaps you think, “I could do that, and get a few hundred unique visitors at a blog about nothing.”

Reader, you could. You want a shot at guest-blogging here? Maybe leading to a permanent spot? It could be arranged. God knows I could use a longer weekend.

Seriously, though, it’s one of those mornings where I wonder if J.C. will write me a program that keeps track…not just of posts, but maybe of total words published here. I’m thinking it has to average out to 3,000 a week, times 52… 156,000 words, or roughly two books’ worth a year. All over my morning coffee. This is either madness or graphomania, and maybe the same thing.

Last summer one of my blog fans said, “Surely there’s a book in this.” I said, “Yes, I’m sure people will buy a highly perishable product between hard covers that was previously — and still is — available free in 700-word chunks online.” But columnists still publish anthologies, don’t they? True, but I never buy those. Or rather, I buy them when they’re published by friends. And my favorites have been the ones vanity-published by friends, or on presses so small they might as well have been. Occasionally I still pick up those produced by Mike Harden, for my money still the best newspaper columnist you never heard of, a generalist out of the Jim Bishop mold, still writing in the Columbus Dispatch from retirement. I used to read his collected works when I was out of ideas myself, and over time got to where I can even recite chunks from memory. He once wondered what would happen if the great poets had labored on Madison Avenue. Like, for instance, James Whitcomb Riley:

When de frost is in de fuel line
And de DieHard’s kind o’ dead
And you 50 miles from nowhere
With icicles on yo’ head
You’ll be wishin’ an’a hopin’
As yo’ shoes fill up with snow
Dat you’d bought it at Sohio,
And let dem pay de tow.

That’s a joke only middle-aged Buckeyes would get. Sohio’s gasoline offered Ice-Guard ™ protection. No fuel-line freeze-up, or Sohio pays your tow. They sponsored the weather report on every radio station in town, always with that promise. Only once in my life did my car stop running in a cold snap, and I wondered, briefly, if I might have fuel-line freeze-up. How, exactly, would I go about collecting my reimbursement from Sohio? Would I have to prove that was Sohio gas in the tank? I paid cash for gas; surely they’d fight me. And then I’d have to provide testimony by a certified mechanic that yes, it was fuel-line freeze-up that had caused my car to stop on U.S. 33 between Lancaster and Athens, probably in some sort of legal deposition, and by the time it was all over, I’d get a few lousy bucks to cover just the towing charge. What a ripoff, and…

I twisted the key again. Car started right up. Reverie over.

No, one footnote: Sohio became Amoco. Amoco became? Yes: BP. Sohio was swallowed by BP. I will always miss their logo:

That cup was given to me by a fellow Buckeye, and I gave it to J.C., another fellow Buckeye.

And now I have bored the pants clean off you, and it’s time to get to the bloggage:

Jack Russell Terriers — little bastards. That story is equal parts hilarious and tragic, but at the end it’s about how a Jack Russell can chew off his owner’s goddamn toe, and still end up the hero.

Wife suspects something’s going on, finds out her husband has another wife and family. How? How else? Via Facebook.

Speaking of which, if you’re not reading the Wall Street Journal’s series on internet privacy — rather, the lack thereof — you’re missing a chance to get simultaneously terrified and infuriated. Particularly today.

And now, I should go do some real work. Maybe write a book.

I’m trying to analyze yesterday’s primary results, in which a moderate Republican, Rick Snyder, triumphed over four others, and by “triumphed,” I mean, “shamed them.” The two tea party candidates, Dutch and Smirky, came in second and third and split the right wing down the middle. Dutch, Pete Hoekstra, would have been the lesser of the two evils, but only incrementally, and besides, Snyder beat him like a drum. How shocking to discover that a movement based on ideological orthodoxy can’t attract a sufficiently orthodox candidate to please everyone.

Or, in the case of Nevada, a sane one.

The Democrats nominated a fiery populist, Virg Bernero. Conventional wisdom is that we’ll have a Republican governor in fall, and my guess is, Snyder will beat Bernero like a rented mule. I can live with a Gov. Snyder.

Elsewhere, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, who stayed holed up in her bunker all night, fell hard to a state senator, Hansen Clarke, so that’s showbiz. And in my state-rep primary, the harder-right tea party organizer lost to a more moderate Republican who dropped lots of green buzzwords in her platform literature. Michigan is a more moderate state than many, and I don’t want to draw grand conclusions in a time of economic emergency, but I’d say that for the time being, we’re less interested in stopping ENCROACHING MARXISM than in getting the economy’s engine running again. Just a thought.

It wasn’t a terrible day, but a frustrating one. I had the strong sense of running very hard and gaining no ground, which is never pleasant. So I went for a fast bike ride in hot-soup weather conditions, then remembered I needed milk and OJ. Stopped at Kroger, stepped into the blessed AC and promptly began sweating like someone having a heart attack. I must have looked alarming, because an old lady told me to go ahead of her at the checkout. The guy in front wasn’t giving any ground, checking out with a case of Miller High Life tall boys. He did tell me, more than once, that his children didn’t like skim milk, and called it “water milk.” I didn’t tell him that my husband didn’t like Miller High Life, no matter what size the can. On the other hand, I just put a six-pack carton of his current favorite in the recycling, and glimpsed the price tag: $9.69. FOR A SIX-PACK?!?? Jeez. Oh, well. Bell’s Oberon, if you’re wondering.

And then I salvaged what remained of the day with a tomato and corn pie, recipe left in the comments last Friday by I-forget-who, but I thanks you just the same. It was delicious. If you make it yourself, be advised you can use Pillsbury pre-made pie crusts (I did) and any old kind of cheese you want (I did) and even add ingredients (I’d suggest bacon), and you will not be sorry. Less-juicy tomato varieties would make it less soupy, but if you just squeeze the pulp out of about two-thirds of them (leaving a little for taste), everything will work out juuuust fine. It was the kind of dish that really salvaged the evening, even if Kate wouldn’t touch it. More for me.

Today, I’m trying to change my luck. “Transformers 3” is hiring paid extras, so I just submitted my deets and headshot. I think I really missed my chance by not joining the “Red Dawn” cast of thousands last year; with my figure and excellent pronunciation of Russian, I was a natural to play a stout lesbian prison-camp guard who makes lusty eyes at one of the young Wolverines — you know, the Mary Woronov type.

By the way, when is “Red Dawn 2010” going to be released? I have about half a dozen films featuring Detroit friends and acquaintances to see, and all of them are backed up like aircraft in a holding pattern. Like “The Irishman.”

Bloggage: Jolene recommended this to me, and I finally got around to reading it. It’s heartbreaking, but essential, a typically excellent Atul Gawande look at a medical topic — end-of-life care, in this case. I will spare you the snarky remarks about Sarah Palin and death panels.

Oh, and the NYT does yet another story on the thriving Detroit arts scene. These reporters must take a number at some of these installations. Oh, well: Beats ruin porn.

And that’s it for me. Where do these summer mornings go? (You’re looking at it.) It’s blistering hot and looks like a storm’s a-comin’, so I might as well get some work done.

The New York Times discovers a trend:

At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.

Last year sometime, a local college teacher offered some pieces by his class, who were preparing multimedia journalism projects. Since multi is what GrossePointeToday.com is aiming for, I said send those puppies in.

The first one to arrive had one of those jarring prose shifts midway through that always sets off the alarm. Suddenly, the writer began capitalizing Important Concepts and her sentences took on a distinctly different rhythm. As some of you know, we made a splash a while back with this very thing, and I snipped a sentence from within and asked Professor Google what he thought. Lifted, intact, from Wikipedia. Contrary to what you might think, I hated being the spoiler, but I let the teacher know, and the usual kerfuffle ensued. The details are unremarkable, except for this: The teacher said a full written apology was part of her sentence. It never arrived. I’m sure she didn’t understand the reason.

This doesn’t surprise me; the line between citation and theft has always been smudgy, and copy-and-paste didn’t start with cntrl-C/cntrl-V. It confused me as a student, and it confuses me still, sometimes. The term “common knowledge” means it belongs to everyone, after all, so I was always wrestling with some citation or another — did I have to footnote dates? Simple facts? I think the only reason it comes easier now is because I’m accustomed to reporting, with all its attribution and colons. Police gave this account of the incident: But I’m very glad I don’t have to write papers anymore, and I’m sure my payback for pointing out a certain Bush administration official’s plagiarism will come when Kate does this, unwittingly, down the road.

My friends already down that road say the next thing is high-school projects, in which teachers try to head this stuff off at the pass with some ridiculous procedures — in-class research, hand-written drafts, etc. It’s a real aggravation that makes research papers, never anyone’s favorite thing, even more painful.

Anyway, that’s a good story. I recommend it.

There were lots of good stories this weekend. The Wall Street Journal is rolling out a project on internet privacy from the business angle, i.e., what your browser is telling marketers about you. It’s no accident you keep getting served ads that eerily track with your interests. I’ll say this for that 3A Tiffany’s ad in most national publications — it doesn’t care that I’m not in the market for expensive jewelry. I get to look at the pretty rings and all they know is, I subscribe to a national newspaper. Which says a lot right there.

Related: Watch how you tweet, Facebook and YouTube. But you knew that.

Tomorrow is Election Day in Michigan — the primaries for governor, etc. I notice the tea-party candidates hereabouts are full of contempt for the bank bailouts, but are oddly silent about the other big one, which involved a pretty important industry around here. I noticed tea-party types in Fort Wayne praising GM for keeping the plant there open, not mentioning what the alternative pushed by their confederates would have been. Paul Ingrassia at the WSJ takes a look a year later:

…the bailout was about as popular as a flat tire. Many Americans nursed longstanding grudges for cars like the 1978 Dodge Omni, in which a wiring defect caused the horn to blow whenever the steering wheel was turned. (No kidding; check Consumer Reports.) Others understandably feared that General Motors would become Government Motors.

But what alternative, really, did Mr. Obama have? Had GM and Chrysler collapsed and been liquidated, investors would have picked up some of the pieces. That would have taken years. Meanwhile, the parts makers that supply GM and Chrysler would have collapsed too. Those same parts makers also supply Ford, Honda, Toyota and others, whose U.S. factories would have faced havoc.

The impact on the broad U.S. economy—including the car dealers in all 50 states, advertising agencies, accounting firms, etc.—would have been somewhere between difficult and disastrous. Nobody really knows. The Detroit bailout was like changing a diaper: a dirty job that had to be done because the consequences were worse.

Finally, speaking of plagiarism, a recipe, at Deborah’s request, copied (by hand) from Alice Waters’ “Chez Panisse Vegetables.” I have my problems with Waters as a food-policy expert but certainly not as a chef, and this bean gratin might have been my favorite thing from Saturday’s dinner. Healthy, light, delicious, made with fresh beans, available in markets year-round but especially now:

Fresh shell bean gratin

2 to 3 pounds fresh shell beans (cannellini, cranberry, pinto, flageolet, etc.)
salt
6 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 onion
4 cloves garlic
1 or 2 sage leaves
optional: 1 small bunch greens (broccoli raab, chard, mustard, turnip, etc.)
2 medium tomatoes
1/2 cup toasted bread crumbs

Shell the beans. Yield will vary according to variety, but you want to end up with about 3 cups shelled beans. Cook them with just enough water to cover by an inch. (Fresh shell beans absorb very little water.) When they have come to a boil, add salt and 2 tablespoons olive oil, and lower the heat to simmer. Cook until the beans are tender, about 30 minutes. Drain the beans and save their liquid.

While the beans are cooking, dice the onion and cook it in 2 tablespoons olive oil with the garlic cloves, peeled and cut into slivers; the sage leaves, chopped; and some salt. Cook over low heat until soft and translucent. If you wish, cook a small bunch of greens with the onion; add a little of the bean water along with them, if you do. When the onion is cooked, add the tomatoes, roughly chopped, raise the heat, and cook for a minute or two more.

Combine the beans in a gratin dish with the onions, tomatoes and greens. Add enough bean water to almost cover. Taste, correct seasoning, and pour the rest of the olive oil over the gratin. (You can prepare the gratin in advance to this point, even the day before, and refrigerate it.) Finish by topping with the toasted bread crumbs, and bake in a preheated 350-degree oven for 45 minutes. Check occasionally and moisten with more bean water if it seems to be drying out.

Alice says you can use a variety of beans, which sounds really good, but you have to cook each separately, as the cooking times will vary.

And now Manic Monday commences. Must have food for sustenance! I’m thinking eggs scrambled with spinach, shallots and goat cheese and a big-ass fruit salad on the side. I love summer, I do I do I do I do…

It was hot this weekend. How hot was it? Here’s one of the neighbors at Alex’ house:

Alex said he’s never seen a squirrel relax like this. I have, once. It was on a picnic table, and it was stretched out, belly down, in much this fashion. It was also on a hot day. Spriggy would stretch out like this, terrier-style, but almost always on a cool surface, like a tile floor, or even wood. That picnic table wasn’t cool, but maybe it was, relative to everything around it.

Or maybe squirrels know the behavior, but aren’t good about applying it. Little pea-brains.

It was a hot weekend, yes. Mid-90s, horrible humidity. We went to the lake Friday, our staging ground for a run to Fort Wayne Saturday, then home again Sunday. Kate wanted to see her friends. Alan hadn’t been back since we left. Good news: Our house was sold, downtown looks great, I got a mint-condition large-folio collection of New Yorker cartoons in the Friends of the Library shop for $8. (God, I miss that library. The recent expansion and remodel cost $80 million, and required a tax increase. The usual suspects whined and passed petitions for a remonstrance. Why do we need a fancy library when we have the internet, etc. etc. blah blah blah. I would hear none of it. All my damn life my tax money has gone to support stadiums I will never set foot in. Just once I wanted a big fancy public-works project for people like me, and I got it. And then we moved. Sigh.)

The bad news: The south side is looking pretty… what’s the word? Oh yes: Detroity. Our neighborhood grocery, closed. Our neighborhood Italian restaurant, closed. Our neighborhood fancy restaurant, closed. General Electric factory, closed. Lots of plywood, lots of For Sale or Lease. The recession hasn’t been kind to any city, but it’s been especially tough on Midwest manufacturing centers.

But we saw our old neighbor, Deb, and sat outside in the shade in her lavish new outdoor kitchen, watching her goldfish swim in her new outdoor pond. She was seeing a contractor for a while. I told Alan that if anything happened to him, that’s where I’d be hanging around — construction bars, making eyes at guys in tool belts. And we saw Alex, and marveled at his place in summertime. I’d only seen it in winter, and needed to behold the enormous vegetable garden and flower garden and boat lift and outdoor fireplace. The vegetable garden has an electric fence and metal plates driven a foot deep at the perimeter to discourage chipmunks, but they get in anyway. Suggestions welcome, I’m sure.

And then home, where a line of thunderstorms passed through and blew some of the heat away, so I can commence Manic Monday with a relatively dry scalp. Some bloggage:

Roger Ebert on BP. Simple, sane, bewildered — as are we all.

Why I love the British newspapers, chapter infinity. Imagine pitching this story to an American editor: “I’d like to ask a variety of prominent artists about how Caravaggio influenced their work.” “News peg?” “None.” “Sounds great!” Would never happen.

The Wikileaks doc dump on Afghanistan is today. This New York magazine piece has several links within. Read, wail and commence gnashing teeth. I don’t know what else to do. Except get to work. So that’s where I’m heading.

Why we still have a lot of work to do on gay acceptance. When a guy like this doesn’t feel the need to marry a woman and have sex with men in parks, then maybe we’ll have made real progress.

Oh, what am I talking about? We have made real progress. When I had a bad riding lesson, my instructor would counsel the long view: Don’t think about where you are today. Think about where you were six months ago, and how much you’ve improved since then. It’s depressing when a married father of four, faced with arrest in a gay cruising spot, panics and things escalate to the point of violence. But where were we a few years ago? At least some gay people can get married and live out ‘n’ proud. I ran into a married father of two the other day in the grocery store, but he’s married to another man, the kids are adopted and if they were any more decent and upright, they’d be in danger of being elected to office.

I got an e-mail from a friend the other day:

I wouldn’t call it a milestone, but it’s a definite ministone, one of those little markers that show how the complexion of ordinary life is changing. During a four-hour stint at the Wells County 4-H Fair yesterday, I stumbled into a long talk about, broadly speaking, the gay experience. Met a guy I went to high school with, we had eons of time to kill watching our kids in the same events, and we started comparing notes on politics. I found that Mr. hyper-Catholic is a low-key gay-rights booster, and it’s a serious area of friction he and his uber-conservative wife have with their extended families.

Their “radicalizing” experience: Another of our classmates, a close friend of theirs, came out to them in the late ’90s. Mr. Catholic had no clue, and he said he was left speechless and fumbling to react. “I gotta hand it to my wife. She gave him a big hug and said, ‘Do you have someone special? Tell us all about him!'”

On one hand, hers seems a corny reaction, like something Grandma would say. But mostly it’s charming that she could suppress all her religious worry-wartism in a blink and flash him what I think of as the universal old-biddy code for demonstrating acceptance of gay people: “Dish the gossip on your romantic life, on the double.”

This is, I remind you, one of the most conservative corners of one of the most conservative states in the union. As I said a while back on another website: It’s over. The skirmishes will continue, but the war is over.

But the skirmishes will likely continue for pretty much ever. Societal acceptance will help. The passage of time will help. But there will always be gay people who feel their attraction to people of the same sex is wrong, somehow, and want to change it. That’s the part of the pray-the-gay-away movement that interests me — the people who seek it out, for whatever reason.

We like to think that those people are self-loathing, and no doubt many of them are. But what about those who aren’t? What about people whose sexuality falls somewhere in the middle of the continuum, who want to push it closer to the other side? Do they have anything interesting to say in this? Consider that classmate in Wells County. The traditional path for a young gay person in such a community would be to head to Indianapolis or Chicago after high school or college, somewhere with old houses to fix up and community theater and softball leagues and Teva sandals and other stereotypically gay things, and settle in among the critical mass a smaller community can’t produce.

But what about the guy — let’s assume a guy, for this argument — who may be same-sex attracted, but actually wants a female wife and children and whatever else goes along with it? Is he going to Chicago? What if he likes small-town Wells County life? What if he wants five acres on the edge of town and a Rotary Club membership? Is he ever going to be completely comfortable in his skin? I don’t know. Probably not. My guess is, he’ll head to Chicago a few weekends a year, on business, and cruise the parks. I think the closet will always be with us. I think all we can do is make it smaller.

OK, then. I front-load my week: Monday is the busiest, de-escalating until Friday, when I try to take a little me time. But lately it’s been a full-speed blowout through Thursday, and pals? It is getting on my last damn nerve. So let’s cut to the bloggage before I hop to the shower:

“Scream 4” wraps in Plymouth. I blew up that picture of Courtney Cox and was reminded of Coozledad’s description of Madonna: “A stew bird.” Man, I’ll say.

The Andrew Breitbart business yesterday leaves me nearly spluttering with rage. When I get spluttery, I turn to Roy to channel it into coherence.

Oops, almost forgot: MRIs of vegetables. Because we can.

Me, I’m off.