The heat, or maybe the calendar, has brought grackles to the yard. My birdwatching is pretty casual, but I associate flocks of grackles with withering summer days. We’re going on a second week without rain, so with water in short supply, they’ve turned our birdbath into their private spa, strolling around the driveway nearby and scaring off anything smaller, except for a few cheeky robins, who are closer to their size.

And I do mean strolling. These birds don’t hop so much as walk. They are a motorcycle gang. They probably have tattoos under their feathers. Meanwhile, the goldfinches stay away, and even the wrens, my chatty little buddies, seem to have moved a few yards away.

The grackles alternate great splashy baths with foraging through the ground cover for their traditional diet of crap on the ground. Of course, that’s not all they eat, and I feel fortunate to have seen the display described in that link, more fortunate still to have read LAMary’s offhand comment on it:

Grackles never look sweet in illustrations. Ever. I know a very nice person named Robin. If someone was named Grackle, they would likely have a job gassing puppies at the pound.

Grackle’s second in command at the pound would be Heckuva J. Brownie, an idiot manchild. That’s one of my new favorite phrases, having turned up in a recent rewatching of “Barton Fink.” Audrey lays out the secrets of screenwriting for Barton, in this case a B picture featuring wrestlers:

Well, usually, they’re . . . simply morality tales. There’s a good wrestler, and a bad wrestler whom he confronts at the end. In between, the good wrestler has a love interest or a child he has to protect. Bill would usually make the good wrestler a backwoods type, or a convict. And sometimes, instead of a waif, he’d have the wrestler protecting an idiot manchild. The studio always hated that. Oh, some of the scripts were so . . . spirited!

Boy, you can tell I slept badly last night, can’t you? I’ve kicked the thermostat up a degree, so the central air doesn’t have to work quite so hard. It still works very hard, but I woke up before 7 a.m. with no chance of further slumber. Ah, middle age.

Or, given that I spend the hours before bedtime chasing down news, it might be that I was simply disturbed by current events. Like this story. Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf:

FARIDPUR, Bangladesh — Whenever Bangladeshi brothel owner Rokeya, 50, signs up a new sex worker she gives them a course of steroid drugs often used to fatten cattle.

For older sex workers, tablets work well, said Rokeya, but for younger girls of 12 to 14 — who are normally sold to the brothel by their families — injections are more effective.

“It’s the quickest way to make a girl plump and hide her actual age if she is just a teenager,” Rokeya said, adding that the drug, called Oradexon, is cheap and widely available.

There’s something a little smelly about the story, however, which speaks of users becoming addicted. You can’t get addicted to steroids, can you? They can screw up your body and mind something fierce, but addiction? Meh.

So, as we seem to have already cut to the bloggage, here’s a little more:

Criminals, when disposing of your guns, do yourself a favor and throw your iPhone in there, too. I once found a woman’s DayRunner lying on the sidewalk while walking the dog. I took it home and used all my powers to find its owner, via the advanced investigation technique of looking her up in the phone book. Disconnected. So I started combing through it for an address, and learned so much about her, just from the notes to herself, that it sort of scared me. She had an elderly parent. She was looking for work. The phone disconnection was maybe connected to a sticky note near the back, with the title of a bankruptcy self-help book. There was also a bill in there, with an address, and I dropped it in her mailbox the next day. I don’t think I wanted to look her in the eye.

If anyone ever found my phone, I’d be done for — calendar, contacts, games, text messages, e-mail, even my secret guilty music pleasures, all there for anyone to see. They should call them dumbphones.

How hot is it where you are? Eighty-six here, and it’s not even 11 yet.

But it’s past 10. Time to go, with apologies for aggravated lameness.

One of the funniest passages in “True Confections,” featured on the nightstand a few months back, concerned the disastrous introduction of a white-chocolate product to a small, family-owned candy company’s long-established line. It begins with a candy trade-show encounter with the products of Green & Black, a chocolatier of which I’d never heard.

The author, Katharine Weber, throws in a lot of real candy brands in the course of her story, I assume for verisimilitude. But the line at the center of it is entirely fictional, so I wasn’t sure about Green & Black. I eat plenty of chocolate, but until recently — until reading “True Confections,” in fact — I have stayed away from most candy bars. It’s a terrible vice for a stuck, non-smoking writer to be near vending machines, and I overindulged when I still had an office job. Of course I make exceptions for the usual Halloween/Easter events. Not to do so would be wrong.

But I’ve discovered what probably everybody does, eventually — two or three squares of really good dark chocolate is more satisfying after a meal than a piece of cake, and has fewer calories, too.

Anyway, the “True Confections” narrative goes on at some length about Green & Black’s white chocolate bar. Rapturous length, in fact — its texture and strong vanilla flavor and so on. And so, last week, when we stopped for the night in Toronto en route to Montreal, I had the strongest possible endorsement fresh in my memory when I stopped in to a little grocery in search of a newspaper and found a checkout display of Green & Black chocolate bars. They exist! They come in a million different flavors! And there, right there in front of me, was the storied white-chocolate variety. Newspaper forgotten, I snatched up a 100-gram bar and tucked it into my purse.

We didn’t eat it until the next day. But it didn’t last long. It was too irresistible, too easy to break off square after square, place it on your tongue, and let its creamy vanillatude melt in your mouth. Weber points out that too much white chocolate is chalky and overly sweet, but this had just the right proportions of everything.

I saved the label and hit the website when we got home, and was amazed to discover it’s available at Kroger, Target, Meijer and other run-of-the-mill stores. Where have you been all my life, Green & Black? When I visited Target, I learned where: Hiding behind the better-known Lindt and Godiva and Ghiradelli, that’s where. Target only had two varieties, the original dark and the newest — peanut. My guess is, G&B doesn’t have the cash for big-time slotting fees at places like Kroger. My search will go on, and I believe I’ll only have to travel as far as the nearest gourmet grocery.

Meanwhile, while we’re talking books and things I didn’t know about until recently, I have to say that until the ridiculous and widely mocked trailer for Glenn Beck’s new “book,” I didn’t even know such a thing existed — trailers for books, that is. Excerpts, sure. Not videos. So I apologize for being late to the party, but it’s a pleasure to offer this one, for Laura Lippman’s own upcoming release, “I’d Know You Anywhere:”

The book doesn’t drop (as the hip-hopper say) until August 17th, but I just spent some Amazon bucks to pre-order it through my store, Nance’s Kickback Lounge, and if you’re planning to do the same, well, I thanks you.

Now I have Laura’s and Martin Cruz Smith’s new novels to look forward to in August. Get outta my way, other lazy bums.

Bloggage? OK:

Christopher Hitchens has cancer. Sad news for anyone, and the second throat-area cancer diagnosis I’ve heard this week, the other being Mike Harden, my former Columbus Dispatch colleague and, like Hitchens, another long-time smoker. Smoking is only one risk factor for esophageal cancer, which Hitchens has. Another is drinking, two activities Hitchens has excelled at for years. I know he’s unpopular in many lefty circles, but let’s not go there, OK?

Alan is perplexed by this story, and wants someone to explain it to him. As near as he can tell, it’s about a hipster doofus who decorates axes and sells them to other hipster doofuses, and if there’s more to it than that, please send up a flare.

We haven’t had an OID (only in Detroit) story for a while, so here’s one: The acting superintendent, the woman who blew the whistle on the board president for fondling himself in front of her during their meetings, didn’t have her contract renewed. But the board president was charged. For “misconduct in office.” I’ll say.

And with that, it’s off to work. A good one to all.

A motorist pulled up next to me while I was riding my bike the other day to say she found me “difficult to see.” I was wearing a black top and beige shorts — monochrome, c’est moi — and I could see her point. So yesterday I put on a pink top and headed out to Target for some exercise gear in colors to induce eyeball hemorrhage.

My local Target is in a mall that is becoming increasingly racially segregated, and I’m not the race it’s selecting for. That means the local Macy’s has a men’s millinery department, but it can be difficult to find a jean skirt for Kate that doesn’t say BABY PHAT across the butt. However, it has a Lowe’s, Home Depot, Sears and Target, so we spend a good deal of cash there.

I quickly identified the bright-eyes tops and snagged two, one of which makes my complexion look like I’m in the last stages of a terrible liver disease, but this isn’t intended to flatter. I wandered over toward the skin emollients and was drawn into the orbit of a woman in the uniform of the U.S. Postal Service, having a very loud conversation on her Bluetooth:

“Well, that’s some BULLshit, then, because we’re getting three GPS errors a block on that system. …uh huh…uh huh…I’m telling you, until you get out there, you don’t know what I’m talking about, but it’s the truth.” Her tone was decisive edging into belligerence; who in the world was she talking to? Surely not her boss. A union rep? A colleague?

“You don’t know that because you never been a clerk. I’ve been a clerk! I know what it’s like!”

Whoever was on the other end had better be listening, because I believed every word she said. Eavesdropping is one of my favorite things to do, and I recommend it to anyone who aspires to put words in another’s mouth. Of course, no one eavesdrops like Lance Mannion. Read and imitate.

And that’s pretty much all I did yesterday, other than writewritewrite. I don’t like to self-pimp, but here’s something I wrote yesterday, for the other site I run, on a topic that increasingly interests me these days — what is to become of our public institutions as public money falls short of sustaining them. The solution reached in Grosse Pointe schools isn’t perfect, but it’s a pretty big step forward, at a time when many municipalities and school districts around here are still wringing their hands. In the Pointes, many are still fighting over tax increases that translate to lower tax bills, i.e., raise the millage while property values are falling, which means a lower tax bill, but not quite as much as if rates were left alone. Some of the rhetoric is ugly, and suggests some won’t be happy until every employee who draws a paycheck from the public is living on bread and water. Anyway, what I mainly want to do is pimp a really good “This American Life” episode we listened to en route home from Canada, “Social Contract,” which was sort of the inspiration for my column.

And which leads us into the bloggage:

Elena Kagan, funny lady: Where were you on Christmas day, Ms. Kagan? “You know, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

I swear I saw a classified ad once for three pairs of men’s underwear, “like new.” I was not surprised to find u-trou on a list of 20 things you should never buy used, but on the other hand, do you have to tell people this? And who in their right mind buys used makeup?

Rod Blagojevich hates Carol Marin.

Finally, the miracle man, Mark Bittman, does it again — following last summer’s hugely popular 101 salads feature, here’s 101 foods to grill. With delicious-looking pictures. I know what I’m doing for the rest of the summer.

It’s a perfectly lovely morning here, the last few days’ oppressive humidity blown off, the sun gleaming, the air deliciously cool. So you know what that means:

The people across the street are having some trees trimmed this morning. Yes, a wood chipper. I am going insane.

This is the downside of work-at-home self-employment. Well, that and the lousy money, and the lack of health insurance, and no one to bat ideas around with. I could probably think of a few more, but, well — the wood chipper just fired up again.

Sorry. I shouldn’t complain.

Having a bit of difficulty getting started this a.m. Or rather, I got started pretty early on other stuff, and can’t shift my head into blogspace. It seemed I missed a lot in my absence, including the whole Weigel thing, which I still can’t quite wrap my head around. The WashPost hires a blogger to cover the conservative movement, encourages a blogging voice, and then pushes him out when he becomes, what? A little too blogalicious? Because he trashed Matt Drudge? In writing? Well, OK. I get it. You can’t go around making smart cracks of the sort people make every day, at least not in writing. Because that would prove…something, I dunno.

For the record: I’m in favor of a more open exchange of ideas and even insults. If that means a lot of “biased” people get to keep their jobs, then so be it. I liked Weigel’s columns while they lasted. Have we figured out who dimed him? I’m still catching up, but this…

“It seems like he spends a lot of time apologizing,” said Penny Nance, the chief executive of Concerned Women for America, one of Weigel’s conservative critics. “The problem is Concerned Women for America and other conservatives resent the idea of the Washington Post or other major news affiliates hiring people who hate us to be the ones to report on us. David Weigel has already shown great distaste, if not downright disdain, for conservatives, so it’s difficult for us to take the Post seriously when this is the person the Post hires to cover conservatives.”

…caught my eye. In other words, we want to approve who covers us. The line for ring-kissing forms to the left. I can’t add more than Scott Lemieux at LGM, so I won’t.

And with that, I think I’d best get back to work. We’re obviously off the rails here. Apologies, and I’ll try to come to the table with a little more sentence-crafting savvy tomorrow.

I was sitting in the midst of Bitches Brew Revisited, one of the opening-night concerts at the Montreal Jazz Festival — excuse me, the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal — when it occurred to me why jazz is so popular here: Because French Canadians are basically French, and the French can be reliably counted on to embrace anything most Americans hate. It makes them feel superior. Perhaps they are superior. They’ve certainly got the charming-city thing figured out. “Bitches Brew,” I’m not so sure. There are moments in that record that feel like genius, others more like the emperor’s new clothes. That’s when your mind wanders.

So I’m starting a list: Things the French Love that (Most) Americans Hate. So far: Modern jazz, sweetbreads, politicians with wandering peckers. Let’s leave Jerry Lewis off for now. Dig deeper.

And yes, we had a fine time in Montreal. You are free to disagree with my contention that French Canadians are “basically French.” I’m aware that to a Parisian, a French Canadian is a knuckle-dragging, fur hat-wearing lummox. A former editor of mine was French Canadian on his mother’s side and spoke the language, and told me a story once of riding in a taxi from the Paris airport, chatting up the driver, who complimented him on his graceful usage while simultaneously disparaging those blockhead Canucks who massacre it every day in his taxi, and… Suddenly this is sounding very much like a taxi story, I realize.

Whatever. I did enjoy being immersed in a different language for a few days, because it reminds you both of how very much you know and how very much you don’t know. I pointed out to Kate several times that faking it through a foreign country isn’t so hard, that much of it is non-verbal puzzle-solving and other tricks. The elevator button for the hotel lobby says R instead of L, but it’s nothing you can’t figure out. Besides, it’s so amusing. The Lonely Planet guide said that even in France, stop signs are red, octagonal and say STOP, but in Quebec, they’re red, octagonal and say ARRET. Still, if you know the red octagon part, you can figure out the rest. And it’s fun to speak fake French, and speculate on why it’s the language of diplomacy; my theory is that it sounds much classier to call someone le sac du douche than just a douchebag.

More stories to come as the week wears on. For now, just this one, transitioning into the bloggage: We were questioned closely at the border, entering Canada, about our plans for the week, and whether we were going to stop in Toronto for the G20 conference.

“The G20 is meeting in Toronto?” I asked. “I didn’t know that.”

“I thought, as journalists, you would know about the half billion we’ve spent on security, the anarchist protestors, and all the rest of it,” the guard said.

Shamed! I was shamed. To be sure, the G20 is one of those things I pay attention to when it’s going on, but criminy, buddy, the pregame is sort of the definition of a local story. Nevertheless, once we were in the Globe & Mail circulation area, it was hard to avoid, and coming home Saturday, we stopped for dinner in a suburb of the big T, and watched the violence on live TV. It looked pretty bad, but I’m just going to throw this out there and see what you think:

Police love nothing more than expecting trouble. It gives them a big, big bargaining chip to present to their municipalities, in return for a blank check. When the Ku Klux Klan held a rally in Fort Wayne, the sheriff’s deputies fell out in a long row behind a line of riot shields that were so new you could practically see the stickum where the price tags had been. Riot shields are not normally gear the Allen County Sheriff’s Department uses, and I’m sure that was only the beginning. News that the world’s anarchists are coming to your city is music to a cop’s ears, as it represents huge overtime checks, helmets and gas masks and, for the bullies, a license to swing a club.

Which is not to say they wouldn’t rather be patrolling a pleasant summer day in the park. I’m just saying there’s a time in every job when you’re needed, and that feels good to everyone. I’m not saying I agree with the contentions in this rather paranoid article — short version: that, in need of a reason to use all that new equipment and justify its expense, that the police started their own riot — but it’s interesting to think about. The stuff about the shoes is intriguing.

I don’t know what the total damage in Toronto will be. But if half a billion in advance spending couldn’t stop it, maybe a different approach is called for next time.

Full-on bloggage today:

A story for Pride 2010, via Hank: After 45 years, a wedding. Also, an 89-year-old Stonewall vet sits it out this year.

The Back of Town blog — the “Treme” people — gets some love.

The Texas GOP comes out against oral sex. Way to nail down the swing vote, guys.

Susan Ager came out of retirement to write a very long account of her recent brush with endometrial cancer in Sunday’s Free Press. I know the lady had — has — a lot of fans, but I was rarely one of them. She didn’t even rank on the Albom Scale of Irritation, but she could get on my nerves. I can take or leave Sunday’s story — it’s certainly better than most of what they run on that space — but can I just say something? When I was a columnist, I got a certain amount of fan mail, and it wasn’t all from Brian Stouder. But when I published reader letters, I cut that stuff out. If someone wrote me a letter, told me how much they liked my column and then commenced to ask a question about something else, I cut right to the question. So when I read stuff like this…

(The surgeon) smiled at my bedside and said, “You’re meeting me for the first time, but I’ve known you for years through your work.”

…I cringe. What happened to self-effacement? There was a DetNews columnist who did the same thing. When she was off sick, she’d come back and write a column about how sick she’d been, peppered with reader notes about how much they’d missed her beautiful face smiling out of the newspaper. I ask you.

And now I ask you for leave, because, as usual, Monday is a killer.

…we were driving during the earthquake, and sailing along on the glass-smooth surface of Rt. 401, felt nothing.

(Tell me, someone: How does a nation modeled on European socialism manage to get so many things right? Five hundred miles of 401, and there was nary a pothole. Plus, I hear that if we’d fallen and scraped a knee, the bandage would be free! Wonders upon wonders!)

Anyway, our waitress at lunch reported her mother felt it in bed and her friend felt it “on the toilet.” A radio station described massive traffic jams in Ottawa, so there may have been some road damage there.

Anyway, having a lovely time, just checking e-mail. Montreal is beautiful, and everyone is speaking French. Except when they’re speaking German. (Tourist season.)

So let’s reset the comments, and bring ’em up here.

What a swell Saturday we had. We celebrated Father’s Day on a noon Saturday-to-noon Sunday schedule, and Father wanted to go on a sunset sail, so that’s what we did. Hit the marina around 8:30 p.m. and away we went. Perfect breeze, perfect night, no mosquitos, not even many fish flies. We didn’t get back until close to 11 — too late for ice cream, but by then Kate was doing the zombie walk. I keep waiting for the much-advertised teenage circadian rhythms to kick in, but so far, no such thing. Her body clock wakes her around 7 most mornings and has her dragging by 9 p.m. She was born to collect eggs on a farm somewhere, preferably one with broadband internet access.

I’m running way short of time this morning, so let’s skip straight to the bloggage:

An interesting story from the Boston Globe magazine, with an irresistible headline: Inside the mind of an anonymous internet poster:

Certain topics never fail to generate a flood of impassioned reactions online: immigration, President Obama, federal taxes, “birthers,” and race. This story about Obama’s Kenyan aunt, who had been exposed as an illegal immigrant living in public housing in Boston and who was now seeking asylum, manages to pull strands from all five of those contentious subjects.

In the next few minutes, several equally innocuous posts follow, including a rare comment in favor of the judge’s decision. Then the name-calling begins. At 2:03 p.m., a commenter with the pseudonym of Craptulous calls the aunt, Zeituni Onyango, a “foreign free-loader.” Seconds later comes the lament from Redzone 300: “Just another reason to hate are [sic] corrupt government.”

Of course, come the Rapture, you’ll be floating in the sky, en route to Heaven. But what about your pet? Who will feed your cat?

And now, I must splutter: I can’t believe how far behind I am, and the week has barely begun. Here, have a picture, and I’ll be back later:

Happy Bloomsday.

If I were a clever blogger, I’d write this entry in the style of “Ulysses,” but sorry — I haven’t read it. (Lance Mannion, take it away!) Always wanted to. Hope to, someday. But on numerous tries, I’ve failed to get much past stately, plump Buck Mulligan, and you know where he shows up.

Once, in a newsroom far, far away, I admitted to never reading “Ulysses.”

“Really?” asked one of my colleagues archly. “You haven’t?” Like this was unusual.

“Really. Have you?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. I asked when.

“Oh, you know…” She fluttered her hand a bit. “High school.”

The smoke alarms trembled as the fumes of her burning pants wafted through the room. She knew enough about “Ulysses” to know she’d made a grave mistake. No one reads “Ulysses” in high school, even a great one. An ambitious teacher might do a side unit on the book for honors students with a few excerpts, but face it — the book is the Mt. Everest of literature for a reason.

The Columbus Dispatch book critic once announced he was going to read it, and just to make sure he finished, he was going to read it in public, a chapter a week, discussing it in a weekly column he called Nighttown Journal. He got through, I believe, chapter three, maybe four. Then Nighttown Journal quietly disappeared. I e-mailed him once, asking if he ever finished it. His reply was sheepish. You know what he said.

On Bloomsday — June 16, the day upon which the events of the novel occur, for you non-English majors — celebrations are held throughout Dublin, including public readings at places mentioned in the text. Our own John C, who lived in Detroit until recently, suggested we do something similar in October, on Elmore Leonard’s birthday. Call it Dutch Day, and lead a group on an odyssey through the city, stopping at places mentioned in his books to read aloud. I think this is a tremendous idea. For one thing, I’ve actually read all the books involved.

Yesterday I had a bit of business to do at a shopping center right around lunchtime, and found myself passing under the exhaust vents at a well-known Chinese chain restaurant distinguished by twin horses at the front door. It didn’t smell greasy, it smelled grill-y and delicious. Friends, I may be the last American extant to have never eaten there, so it was time to rectify the situation. We have terrible Chinese food choices in the Pointes, and I’ve been jonesin’ for some chicken fried rice forever. So I went in and ordered the very same.

Twelve minutes later, the waitress deposited a five-gallon bucket of it under my nose.

It’s been a long time since I had my first portion-size shock, at a Mexican chain place. To be sure, it was mostly lettuce. Then came Bucca di Beppo, but they at least say up front that the dishes are meant to be shared. But it doesn’t take a genius to make a few connections, and one is: Restaurant meals in general have many more calories than their homemade equivalents. People eat more restaurant meals every year, for a variety of reasons. Put them together and you get a reasonable answer to the question posed by Richard Simmons’ vanity license plate: YRUFAT?

I try to be a libertarian about some things, but I have my limits. If they’re going to serve this much in one portion, then I want to see a calorie count on the menu. (Best online estimate: 960.) Sorry, folks, but you’re part of the problem. And don’t give me that “our customers want it” crap. Portion size is determined by economies of scale. Rice is cheap, and it’s easy to cover it with flavorful fat, serve it by the truckload and charge $7.50 a plate for a food cost of probably less than a buck.

I ate less than half. The rest is in my refrigerator. And I’m not going back. I resent being slopped like a hawg.

Bloggage: Everybody knows the Michigan tax incentive is leading to lots of film production here, but it wasn’t until yesterday I learned that scripts are now being vetted for content, and — sorry — but cannibalism is now out:

“This film is unlikely to promote tourism in Michigan or to present or reflect Michigan in a positive light,” wrote Janet Lockwood, Michigan’s film commissioner. Ms. Lockwood particularly objected to “this extreme horror film’s subject matter, namely realistic cannibalism; the gruesome and graphically violent depictions described in the screenplay; and the explicit nature of the script.”

Yes, no one will come to Michigan if they think we’re lousy with cannibals, but have you seen the calorie counts at that Chinese joint lately? Whew, through the roof. Rustic man-pig is far more slimming. Anyway, the NYT Cityroom blog asks where cinema would be if New York had such picky standards:

King Kong (1933)

After arriving in New York via luxury steamer, the giant simian genially poses for photographs while held in mock chains at his Broadway unveiling. At a subsequent cocktail party in his honor, Kong briefly dons a waiter’s white jacket (it didn’t quite fit, to say the least!) and hands out canapes to startled and then amused guests. Later he takes a stroll through the city and discovers that the elevated trains are experiencing a bottleneck near 30th Street. Using hand signals, he helps clear it up, receiving a jaunty wave from a thankful conductor in response. Finally, he scales the Empire State Building to take in the view, cleaning a few windows and reaching into one woman’s apartment to help her arrange her furniture, before arriving at the top, where he is joined by Ann Darrow. The two take in the dawn while discussing their hopes and dreams for the future.

Ha. Off to the salt mines. God knows who wants to take a bite out of me today.

Love getting back to Ann Arbor, even on a stifling day like Saturday. It was for a baby shower, and aren’t those fun. One of my mother’s family stories was about the shower when she was expecting me. It was a brunch, and my aunt made pink ladies. That’s a cocktail that requires egg whites, and after a few rounds, whoever was cooking thought she didn’t want to let all those yolks go to waste, and threw them in with the eggs to be scrambled, which made them hard and rubbery. Pink ladies also require grapefruit juice, and this being before the ruby-red sweet grapefruit was the standard cocktail mixer, the drinks were quite sour and pucker-y.

“My mouth feels like an asshole,” my aunt Charlene is said to have announced, right before she stuck her fork upright in her eggs and left the table.

So with this in my family heritage, it seemed a good idea to bring the ingredients for a fruity afternoon cocktail as part of my contribution. The mother-to-be is expecting a boy, to be named Alexander, so I called my libation the Baby Alexander. It’s basically a margarita made with mango nectar and a little bit of lime juice, and it was a big hit. There was also chicken piccata, two delicious salads, wine and cupcakes. No one told episiotomy stories, and we all mooed when the guest of honor unwrapped the breast pump. Women really know how to throw a party.

I wasn’t sure if I had enough mango nectar, so I stopped at Trader Joe’s in Ann Arbor, after first considering Whole Foods. The parking lot at Whole Foods was packed. It’s always packed. I don’t know when it closes, but my guess is, if they stayed open around-the-clock, the parking lot would never have an open space (every other one occupied by a Prius, natch), the well-off denizens of Ann Arbor lining up to throw money at the cashiers. Trader Joe’s is a bit more downmarket, and everybody, and I mean everybody, had brought their reusable bags, so many that I declined a bag at all, carrying my mango nectar and bag of limes out to the car in my wee hands. I can go green with the rest of you Teva-wearing posers, Ann Arbor.

Along the way I watched the lawns, to see if my favorite A2 cultural trait (weeds) is still in evidence, and yes, yes it is. Expensive real estate, crappy lawns — that’s Ann Arbor for you. Lawn care beyond mowing once a month is too bourgeois for that place. If you mow too often, you’re not keeping up with your New York Review of Books subscription. You might even be a Republican. And there would go the neighborhood.

On my way back I stopped at a place that was called, in my time in A2, the Big Ten Party Store. Alan carped at one of my wine purchases the other day, describing it as “cough syrup,” and I needed to come back strong with a decent bottle of something for a dinner menu to be named later. The Big Ten was run by some former Zingerman’s people, and as I recall, stocked mainly wine and cheese, with a few “artisanal” (how I hate that word) beers thrown in, but at lower prices and 15 percent less attitude. Since I left, they changed their name, a huge mistake, because what beats the fun of buying aged Stilton at a place called the Big Ten Party Store?

Anyway, now all employees wear navy-blue lab coats and hover at the periphery of your space, offering helpful opinions, or perhaps to catch you when you faint at the prices. I was expecting to splurge, but when I saw $25 described as “economical,” I knew I was in over my head.

I did linger for a moment at the leg of jamon iberico in the cooler. Price per pound: $100. Not that you would buy that much, but good lord, when I’m buying ham shaved in razor-thin slices and so expensive that dropping a piece on the floor is like lighting a cigar with a tenner, that’s asking for karmic retribution. I don’t have a full professorship at a respected university. This is out of my league.

I selected a $15 beaujolais and got the hell out of there in a hurry.

(This was the cough syrup, by the way, and Alan’s right, it was pretty bad. I don’t know what happened to the label, as the first 10 bottles I bought were so good it became my vin ordinaire, but recently? Ugh.)

Boring, boring, boring, I know. So let’s hop to the bloggage:

Our national debt crisis is solved. I repeat: Our national debt crisis is solved.

Much of the overpriced wine at that place I just described was labeled “organic.” My mistrust of such standards, honed while living through approximately 7,000 food fad cycles, serves me well. The words “grown in China” and “organic” should not be within 12 miles of each other, and now it seems the U.S.D.A. agrees.

David Mitchell has a new book out. Huzzah!

And now, Manic Monday awaits. Onward!

I’m starting to think having my hard drive melt down — which it didn’t, but it’s more easily understandable than “corrupted firmware update that cannot be repaired without a wipe and reformat” — is the best thing that’s happened to me this year, and it’s not because I have a lightning-fast new machine to play with. I’m reintroducing my backed-up data to the new machine slowly, and with careful consideration of each byte. I’m leaving a lot behind, especially in my web browsing.

For every lost bookmark, I’m finding the freedom to turn my back on 10 more, the distractions that helped me turn too many days into a why-didn’t-I-get-more-done trainwreck. My “blogs” bookmark folder now holds 12 URLs (and yes, yours is one of them). News is even smaller; for all the proliferation of news sources in recent years, I’m finding fewer and fewer worth reading.

I’m undecided over my beloved Idiots folder, and am considering trashing the whole thing. It was dwindling with maturity, which is to say, the older I get, the less willing I am to read people who bug me, just for the scab-picking pleasure of it. On the other hand, as an occasional creative writer, I find the doors some people leave open in the centers of their foreheads to be absolutely fascinating. The oil spill has Rod Dreher, whose life seems ruled by equal parts fear and superciliousness, worrying like one of those dogs that will eat off its own leg rather than endure a little itching. As naked glimpses at neurosis go, it’s hard to top, but is it worth the trouble?

We’ll see. I am dropping Lileks, however. Boring. Bossy? Maybe. Sweet Juniper? He’s in for sure; anyone who keeps getting better, I want to be there for. But the charge in all of these is to set the bar high. (And rely on RSS for people on the bubble.)

If it keeps me from frittering away the rest of the summer getting pissed off at something some moron said, it’s worth every penny:

How was your weekend? Mine was fine. Eastern Market early, riding the bike all over, and movie catch-up weekend, in which I took time to watch a few things piling up on the DVR and/or On Demand menus. Watched: “Frozen River,” “Cadillac Records,” “Lovely and Amazing.” Capsule reviews: Excellent, unwatchable, very fine. “Cadillac Records” received uneven reviews at the time, but were generally good, which only goes to show you…something about film critics. I was attracted by the cast; Adrien Brody is one of those actors who could make telephone-book reading interesting, or so I thought. He couldn’t save Leonard Chess, alas. Someone who’s seen it to the end, tell me: Are the Rolling Stones in any other scenes other than the one where they show up at Chess Records, tell Muddy Waters they named their band after one of his songs, and go jam a little? Alan Lomax blows through the first 10 minutes like a dust eddy, then blows out. People show up, announce their names and a few lines that might as well be subtitled, “I play a small but significant role in the popularization of southern blues in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, but sorry, I can’t stay onscreen very long, because Chuck Berry is right behind me.”

Here’s the problem with biopics: “Behind the Music” did it better, or shorter, anyway. Standard three-act screenplay structure makes every story too predictable. The early years, the meeting of the Significant Other/Manager/Collaborator, the meteoric rise, the betrayal/setback/fall, the epiphany, the comeback. I think projects like this are almost always overpraised, maybe because critics like the music. I certainly did, in “Cadillac Records.” Alan didn’t, but then, he’s got a hate-on for Beyoncé, who is referred to in our house as Bouncy. Once she shows up as Etta James, what had been just barely holding together simply fell apart.

“Frozen River,” now — that was something else. Excellent writing, excellent direction, both by the same person, Courtney Hunt. Absolutely nothing about it was anything you’d call “entertaining,” and yet, it was a great movie. Go figure. And God bless actors like Melissa Leo, who is unafraid to show her true face to the camera and is, against all odds, beautiful.

And “Lovely & Amazing,” now almost a decade old, was, like all of Nicole Holofcener’s work, great. I can’t wait to see what she does with Laura Lippman’s “Every Secret Thing.”

A little bloggage before I hop to Monday’s mania:

A lovely NYT piece about the artesian wells of central Indiana. A friend with a summer cottage in the U.P. gets his drinking water from a neighbor’s spring, and whenever I stayed with him, that was a weekly task — gathering a few gallon-size jugs and filling them. I wonder if it’s still flowing. Keeping commercial bottled-water interests out of Michigan has been an environmental crusade for some time now, in part to protect the aquifer, in part because bottled water is the stupidest fucking product since canned frosting.

The found poetry of Sarah Palin:

Great destiny, our destiny!
To be reached by—responsibly!
Developing our natural resources, this land,
Blessed with clean air, water, wildlife, minerals, and:
Oil and gas! It’s energy!

Finally, a sad story about a woman who fought the good fight in Detroit, and finally couldn’t fight anymore. A story that confirms the value of community policing, and of paying attention to small crimes before the people who commit them graduate to the bigger variety. Unfortunately, the city can’t even handle the big crime anymore. As I said: Sad.

Onward to a police-rounds tour via bicycle. Because my hair still looks good this morning, and needs a case of helmet head. Hope the week ahead is a good one for all.