You never believe it’ll ever happen until it does, and it happened last night (I think): My Mac is fried. There I was, stealing a moment to examine photos of the Great Game Robbery when the screen froze and would not unfreeze, and a hard restart only produced a status bar that resets twice, then quits again. Tried this approximately 10 times with the same result every time.

I’m thinking it’s a motherboard or something similarly vital. Given the age of all involved, I’m also thinking I’ll be shopping for a new laptop in a few hours. I did a backup recently, all my reallyreallyreally important data — writing projects in progress, etc. — is doubly backed up in the Cloud, but I’ll probably lose a few passwords or snapshots here and there.

Let that be a lesson to you. Back up your data. Twice.

So this will be it for me today. Maybe a little bloggage:

Over the years in Indiana, I was aware of what happens at graduation time in Fort Wayne high schools — commencement ceremonies tend to be protracted, testy affairs for all involved. No matter how often principals plead from the stage to hold applause until all graduates have crossed the stage, the reading of names is marked by screeching, air horn-blowing knots of bonehead parents and relatives in the audience, who pride themselves on mini-filibusters of noise as their kid’s name is called, which necessitates long pauses, so the next kid’s name doesn’t get drowned out and/or his own jerkwad parents deprived of their own celebration. The hooliganism has gotten so bad that diplomas aren’t actually physically transferred until the crowd files out, so that any kid who isn’t wearing a mortar board — i.e., the hat-throwers — has to schedule a conference with principal and parents, one last stern lecture, before taking possession.

Like I said, I guess I was aware of this, via the annual letters to the editor and the annual statements by principals, but I hadn’t realized just how bad it was until I stumbled across a guest column in my old newspaper — which, I recently learned, now has one-third the circulation of the other paper in town — by one of the school district’s PR warhorses, floating a trial balloon that, because of the thoughtlessness of the few, maybe they won’t hold any commencement ceremonies at all, and I hope you get that this sentence is a weak attempt to capture the voice the school disciplinarian. But let her do it herself:

Although state law determines who is eligible for a diploma, there are no laws governing how that diploma is to be presented. Indeed, “Pomp and Circumstance” is not required music. Caps and gowns are not legislated attire. There is no requirement for schools to rent at their expense a facility for the event or hire security for crowd control. There is no legal requirement for schools to pay for embossed diploma covers in school colors. There is no requirement for schools to have a graduation ceremony. Has the time come to drop commencement exercises and mail diplomas home or hand them out in home room?

Such a move would be so unpopular I’m taking this as another empty threat from the stage. Still, there’s some good detail there, including this — that Bobby Knight recently received an honorary doctorate from Trine University, and showed up in an open-neck shirt and a sweater. Why? Because he’s Bobby Knight, and you’re not. And what is Trine University? You say you’ve never heard of it? Well, it used to be called Tri-State University, and changed its name two years ago. Trying to class up the joint, I’d imagine. I wasn’t aware they granted doctorates, period, but I guess when the degree is honorary, it doesn’t matter. In that part of Indiana — hey, Pilot Joe, Jen and many others here — they could have named him Philosopher-King and gotten away with it.

Off to the Genius Bar, there to weep and/or spend money.

Pie of the weekend: Strawberry rhubarb:

Yeah, yeah, to be absolutely correct it should be a lattice top crust, but I didn’t want to screw around with lattices when there was solar radiation to be frolicked under. And if Nick Malgieri says it’s OK to put a crumb crust on strawberry rhubarb pie, well, I ain’t gonna quibble.

Have a great holiday.

A short, relatively restrained rant about banks:

Our bank was recently swallowed by another bank. Yay, invisible hand of the market, which punished our previous bank’s bad business practices with death. Now we have a new, better bank. Theoretically.

Of course, the last bank was a swallower too, once upon a time. I moved to Fort Wayne in 1984, back when a bank was a bank, rewarded you for your business and generally followed the rules of an ordered universe. I was new in town, invited to dinner at a new friend’s house.

“I’m looking for a bank,” I said.

“I go to Fort Wayne National,” he said.

“Sold.”

Fort Wayne National’s marketing slogan at the time was, “That’s my bank.” Simplicity itself. All I really cared about was whether they had a lot of ATMs, and whether any were near my home and office. They were. I stayed with them until they were sold to National Spitty (name cleverly disguised to fool some PR agency’s Google alerts), and had the sort of relationship you have with a bank in those days — they kept my money, sold me traveler’s checks before I hit the road, exchanged U.S. dollars for Canadian before our annual theater trip.

The problem came when we moved here. There were National Spitty banks in reasonably convenient locations, and although Indiana’s unique banking laws (i.e., rooted in the 12th century) required us to open new accounts in Michigan, we stayed with them. Why? Because when you’re a Midwesterner, you plod through your life like a mule down a furrow, that’s why. Because we’d been NatSpit customers for years.

Not long afterward, I deposited several thousand dollars in miscellaneous checks at an ATM at the closest location (in Detroit), went about my financial business and, a few days later, received a sheaf of overdraft notices, at $30 per. I called the branch where I’d deposited them and asked what the hell. The manager treated me the way she might treat a panhandling bum, only with less charm. I might be committing check fraud, she said, so she’d held the funds for 10 business days. Who were these payers, anyway, these obscure businesses like “The Detroit News” and “Hearst Publications.” Anyway, I was a new customer. I fit the profile of a sleazebag fraud artist to a T.

“I’ve been a National Spitty customer for 15 years!” I said.

I called the other National Spitty branch nearby, the one in Grosse Pointe Farms. The woman on the phone said, “Oh, you NEVER want to do business in Detroit if you can avoid it. Deposit your checks here, I handle the ATM, and I’ll credit you right away.”

Yes, they actually tell you that here. It’s like Eddie Murphy’s Mr. White sketch, only (Psycho violins) …real.

So things have been bumping along with NatSpit, and over time I realized, like all Americans, that banking had slipped beneath the waves, insofar as customer relations go. My relationship with the people who facilitate my bill-paying and otherwise spare me the hassle of keeping my cash buried in the back yard is cordial enough, but there’s no part of the experience I’d describe as pleasant. In fact, one of the things I generally liked about NatSpit was the way they made it easy for me not to interact with them, by keeping their online service fairly robust. Woe betide if things didn’t go well, however — reaching a human being, at least one with the power to make anything right, was nearly impossible.

(I did visit the Detroit branch where they’d held my checks, once. It resembled nothing so much as a ghetto liquor store, the tellers behind inch-thick bulletproof plexiglass. No wonder they were so testy.)

Long story short, now we’re with another goddamn bank, and already I hate them. They changed all my account numbers and sent me a new debit card, screwing up my gym membership, which is automatically debited. And we discovered a new wrinkle: Unlike National Spitty, which allowed you to transfer money between accounts online and access the funds from the receiving account immediately, ThreeCapitalLetters Bank does not. At least not if it’s a weekend. If you dare to move your money — YOUR OWN MONEY, which I feel the need to add in caps — on a Saturday, you can’t spend it from the receiving account until MONDAY NIGHT. The woman on the phone didn’t even feel the need to apologize for this. Screw you, sucker, we know you’re not going to take your business elsewhere. What, and redo all your direct-deposit arrangements and go through this hassle again? Besides, every other bank in town is going to give you the same deal. Why? Because we can. Have a nice day, and go get your fuckin’ shine box.

Oh, why bother with this? You all have your own tales of pain and woe, if not with banks, then with health insurance companies, mortgage holders or whomever. Here’s what amuses me most about them — how, in our allegedly perfect market-based system, our customer experience should be improving year to year. In some ways, it has, although I credit technology (the ATM) more than management. But mostly, banking — and many other allegedly service-based businesses — has only become more Soviet with time, more monolithic, less sensitive to customer complaint, more frustrating to deal with. Yes, I enjoy checking my balance online or over the phone. No, I don’t like being nickel-and-dimed — or ten-dollared and thirty-dollared — to death over every little thing.

But hey! It’s a holiday weekend! Let’s change the mood:

In the minutes after a cascade of gas explosions crippled the Deepwater Horizon on April 20, confusion reigned on the drilling platform. Flames were spreading rapidly, power was out, and terrified workers were leaping into the dark, oil-coated sea. Capt. Curt Kuchta, the vessel’s commander, huddled on the bridge with about 10 other managers and crew members.

Andrea Fleytas, a 23-year-old worker who helped operate the rig’s sophisticated navigation machinery, suddenly noticed a glaring oversight: No one had issued a distress signal to the outside world, she recalls in an interview. Ms. Fleytas grabbed the radio and began calling over a signal monitored by the Coast Guard and other vessels.

“Mayday, Mayday. This is Deepwater Horizon. We have an uncontrollable fire.”

When Capt. Kuchta realized what she had done, he reprimanded her, she says.

“I didn’t give you authority to do that,” he said, according to Ms. Fleytas, who says she responded: “I’m sorry.”

OK, sorry. Here’s something else, genuinely interesting. The death of the one-word exam at All Soul’s College, Oxford:

The exam was simple yet devilish, consisting of a single noun (“water,” for instance, or “bias”) that applicants had three hours somehow to spin into a coherent essay. An admissions requirement for All Souls College here, it was meant to test intellectual agility, but sometimes seemed to test only the ability to sound brilliant while saying not much of anything.

This is the sort of thing that would have terrified me at 19, but today I think I’d totally ace. What is blogging, if not a daily essay with a one-word prompt? (“Banking.”) However, what I find most interesting about this story is the glimpse at how they arrange things at Oxford. One of my former colleagues’ girlfriends was a Rhodes Scholar, and enrolled at New College. Punchline: Founded in 1379. Those Brits. Such a sense of humor.

The best single line from a “Sex and the City 2” pan (and this, friends, is a crowded field): “…essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls.” Respect to Lindy West, The Stranger.

And with that, I guess it’s time to start the weekend. Have a good long one. I intend to get outdoors. You?

Tuesday morning:

Previous night’s sleep, in hours: Six. Not bad. Pretty typical, in fact. Nothing a couple strong cups of dark roast can’t take care of. Grind, filter, water, switch.

Nothing.

The coffee maker is broken.

I’m going back to bed. See you later.

Jim at Sweet Juniper has a brief but hilarious post about a chapter of parenthood that has passed for me, i.e., the parental experience of the playground. You should not be surprised to learn that it’s different in Detroit than in San Francisco, his last residence. (When an essay turns on the fulcrum, “Then I smelled the weed,” you know we’ve entered a new city.) And yet, in so many ways, it’s the same.

I used to love to take little Kate to Fort Wayne’s various playgrounds, mostly Foster Park and, when we felt like getting the bike trailer out, Kid’s Crossing at Lawton Park. I’d push her in the swing and hope for another kid for her to play with, so I could concentrate on the people-watching and eavesdropping. You never knew what, or who, might turn up.

There was one family whose schedule matched mine for a time; the son took a tennis lesson while his three sisters killed time on the swings. They were nice girls, clad in the unmistakable clothing of the home-schooled Christian — “modest” hemlines, long sleeves, a certain Little-House-on-the-Prairie vibe to the cut and print — but they were lively and sweet, played easily with others, and I always enjoyed watching them. One day they showed up, all three of them wearing some sort of kerchief-type headgear, obviously gleaned from a close reading of that ol’ misogynist, St. Paul, and it was like their mother had tattooed WEIRDO on their foreheads. The other kids kept their distance, and they did the same.

Weekends were different. That’s when you saw the fathers, either because of custody arrangements or just to give mom a break. Fathers relate to their children differently — they hover less, they care a lot less about clean clothing. Once I watched one beam approvingly as his daughter wallowed in an enormous mud puddle, as happily as a pig. Every stitch of clothing she wore was ruined, and her dad kept looking around to beam — that’s my kid, yep — as though he deserved some sort of medal for coolness. As the designated laundress of the family, I withheld my approval. Dirt has its place on a kid, but this was ridiculous.

And there were the fathers who were looking for girlfriends, playing the sensitive-dad card, or maybe something else. One memorable Sunday, a young father commandeered a large portion of the play structure as his personal workout facility. He stripped off his shirt and began hoisting himself around, doing chin-ups and various abdominal moves, punctuating each rep with an ear-shattering ARRRGHHHAHHH that penetrated every corner of the park, the sort of grunt-yell that brands you an asshole even in the gym, much less on the playscape. Everyone glared, but he continued until every muscle was shining and engorged, then looked around for the babes he seemed sure would soon start flocking. I don’t think any did.

A dad tried to pick me up once, as I read Ruth Reichl’s “Tender at the Bone.” “Tender…at…the…BONE. Now, what could THAT be about?” he leered. As though I brought a dirty story to read on the playground. Because I’m such a horny mom. Sheesh.

The full breadth of the human carnival parades before us, every day. It’s a crime not to notice.

No bloggage today, other than Jim, because once again I have to clean myself up and cover three miles by bicycle in, what? Fifteen minutes? Best get movin’! Have a great weekend.

Around the middle of February, I decided there was a damn good reason that getting to the gym required approximately the same motivation as a nude crawl through — well, through the mile or so of depressing suburban landscape between it and my house. We’re always being admonished to listen to our bodies, and my body was making it quite clear that it wished to indulge its inner bear and hibernate the rest of winter.

Plus, I had this book project that was blotting out the sun, and so. You know what happened next.

The book is down to the last details, leaving the house is no longer a trial, the light is kind and plentiful and I am, predictably, flabbed out again. This time, I need to combine the usual strategy of regular exercise and sensible eating with something more drastic — I’m going low-carb, pals. Send search parties if I’m not back in a week.

I likely will be. I’ve tried Dr. Atkins’ whack diet in the past, and it’s always worked the same way: By day three, I’m hallucinating about potatoes. By day five, I’d pay $500 for a single slice of toast. After a week, it’s all over. But — listen to this rationalization — those have always been with the zero-carb plan, and this time around — listen to this, it’s pure bullshit — things will be different! I’m just trying to stay under 30 grams a day. Tough, but doable.

This morning was a good omen: The cheese omelet folded together so beautifully, it looked like a picture from a magazine. My omelets tend to be tasty, but messy, because I overfill them. I threw in as much cheese as I felt like eating, and it was a perfect little envelope of melty deliciousness.

But we shall see. There’s no doubt low-carb diets work. The problem is, they’re hard to sustain, especially if you like food. Who doesn’t like food? Atkins people, who can go on and on about bacon, but recoil in terror at a roasted sweet potato. I love cauliflower, but show me a person who’s satisfied with a cauliflower vichyssoise and I’ll show you someone who is profoundly missing the point of dinner.

I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, going back to the gym feels good-bad. Bad in the inevitable soreness, good in the reassertion of muscle, that which can be felt through all the fat, that is. After two weeks, my low-grade back pain is gone, and even my knees feel better after all those squats. I’ve come to believe that the world would be a better, less cranky place if every home contained a well-used Pilates reformer. When I started mat Pilates classes last year, someone said here they are a revelation, and that is Word, friends. If you’re long of torso like me, I beseech you to give them a try. So does your back.

And that makes approximately 500 words of the most boring subject matter on the planet, and that’s all I will inflict upon you. I just want it on the record somewhere: I’m trying.

It seems I’m overdue for a few words about “Treme,” and they are coming. It’s traditional for HBO to give TV critics four episodes of its shows before they write a review, and that’s what I’m giving myself before committing, but so far: I am digging it. It would be a surprise at this point if I didn’t: Like all good white people with New Yorker subscriptions, I’m a David Simon fan. Anyone interested in looking at the problems of American cities, fairly but passionately, is someone I’m willing to cut a lot of slack. And what happened to New Orleans in 2005 is, it became Detroit more or less over the course of a few days — depopulated, blighted, dysfunctional, but with the same can’t-kill-it pulse. I’m interested to see where it’s going.

And how can you not love a show with snappy dialogue like this?

I brought beignets!
Who you fuckin’?

So, bloggage? Some:

Um, what?

A massive oil spill vile mat of flame in the Gulf of Mexico? Boy, I miss the ’90s. Life was simpler then.

As shallow and simple as my brain is in the morning, of course I’m going to read any story with a headline that asks, Why does this pair of pants cost $550? (The photo was of a male model is distinctly run-of-the-mill khakis.) But when they can get this line above the jump —

“The cost of creating those things has nothing to do with the price,” said David A. Aaker, the vice chairman of Prophet, a brand consulting firm. “It is all about who else is wearing them, who designed them and who is selling them.”

— that’s how I spell WIN.

And now I’m off. Enjoy the end of the week.

I got up with Kate at 7:30 this morning, made her lunch, saw her off to school, prepared the coffee stuff but didn’t press the button on the machine, and sat down with the laptop for the morning stretch. Stretched my legs along the couch, unfurled the afghan against the chill. Hmm, this is comfy.

Two hours later, I woke up. Ruby was staring at me. The laptop had gone to sleep, too.

So I lost my blogging time this morning. Fortunately, I had some stuff set aside.

I’ve avoided Nike products for some time, on the grounds that if I’m going to pay a huge sum for a pair of sneakers, I want the money to go to the Chinese serfs who made them and not the spoiled-brat athletes who endorse them, but now I have one more: The swoosh stands by its men. Even the creeps. Especially the creeps.

The dog cart built by Jim at Sweet Juniper for carrying his kids around town is a huge success. Chapter 2, plus a little appreciation of the beast of burden.

And because you can’t have some sweet without some bitter, a few-days-old piece by our own Coozledad: “The Neighbors.” Read. Some of you already have, but the rest: Read.

I’m told there was a time here when crossing the border from Canada to the U.S. here was no big deal, for most mainly a matter of friendly waves and have-a-nice-days. This was especially true for boaters; I’m told of waterfront restaurants on the St. Clair River where “customs” consisted of writing your name in pencil on a slip of paper dockside. Among the many things we can thank Osama bin Laden for is the fact some nice Canadian ladies can’t take a yoga class in Royal Oak anymore. It’s a teacher-training class, to be sure, but reading this can certainly chip away at one’s inner peace:

All the trouble began in early 2009, when the state of Michigan cracked down on yoga studios, licensing them as “proprietary schools.” Makowski complied, then described her school as a “licensed vocational school,” on her website.

That description, U.S. border officials say, triggered new problems at the border. Officials demanded the Canadian students get student visas to attend their Sunday class. The students agreed — until Makowski discovered she first would have to be certified by the Department of Homeland Security to accept foreign students — a process that could take a year or more — and that’s typically required of colleges, not yoga courses. It’s classic Catch-22.

It starts out being a rule about not letting more Arab students take flight training, it ends up being about yoga. Go figure.

And now off to work, lazy bum that I am.

I’m in the market for a bookcase. I’m always in the market for a bookcase. If you have a bookcase, call me and I’ll at least take a look. In this case, I’m looking for a tradeup — the one piece of furniture that persists “above stairs” in our house from my salad days is an old particleboard p.o.s. bookcase, and I’m ready to be shut of it. I considered painting it — still might, if I can’t find a decent replacement — but would prefer to replace it with something a little nicer. So I’m on Craigslist several times a day, getting reacquainted with my Craigslist luck.

What is Craigslist luck? An example; here is a table Amy Welborn found on her Craigslist (Birmingham, Ala.), for $50:

Look at that thing. It’s gorgeous. Maybe teak? Fifty bucks. Meanwhile, I clickclickclick on linklinklink advertising “bookcase! nice!” and see wrecks that make my particleboard disaster look like vintage Stickley. They’re all asking $80. Or more. And I’d have to drive an hour to find it. Bah.

In all fairness, I have to say all my Craigslist luck hasn’t been bad, but the good stretches were only when I was partnering with someone else. Our filmmaking escapades have all owed a lot to Craigslist, but we must have been piggybacking on someone else’s good luck. I understand people use Craigslist to find jobs; the only writing jobs advertised there are the ones for content farms, where they pay $3 for 400 words. Sex addicts use Craigslist to find so-called casual encounters; if I ever did such a thing, I’d meet an ax murderer.

I do two Craigslist searches when I check — “bookcase” and “grosse pointe.” You never know when someone in your neighborhood will be selling something interesting. And may I just say? Affluent people are the absolute worst to buy secondhand goods from. They think every piece of crap they own is worth a thousand bucks, and all their prices are firm. I saw a woman a couple years ago selling a “brand-new” iPhone for $450. At the time, you could buy one in an Apple store for $400. I sent her an e-mail asking — politely! — what the extra $50 was for. She replied, “Ha ha I already sold it asshole.”

That must have been some case.

Craigslist cut the legs out from under my industry, and now it curses me.

Bloggage? Sure:

For the record, I think the FDA has better things to do than fret about sodium. However, this line from a LGM post on it gave me a smile:

Conservatives have evidently worked themselves into something of an incoherent snit over the FDA’s plans to limit sodium in processed foods. If I understand the anxiety correctly, a cooperative effort between the federal government, industry representatives and public health experts to gradually (and I would imagine quite modestly) reduce sodium levels over a ten-year period is pretty much the sort of thing that Pol Pot did before depopulating the cities and having everyone gouged to death with bamboo.

Hysteria on the right is going around, however; Lance Mannion finds a hilarious essay in Reason and runs with it. Back when past-life exploration was trendy among Shirley Maclaine types, I observed that everyone who claimed an acquaintanceship with prior lives was a princess or Cleopatra or the king of all druids; where were the anonymous serfs and scullery maids? I believe the same affliction exists on the right, too, as Lance points out:

You know, I always thought it was me and my bad habits of stereotyping and making sweeping generalizations about people, but it’s often seemed to me that there is a type of Conservative of the more corporatist and self-congratulatory “libertarian” bent who believes that the only reason he’s not a titan of industry is that America has gone downhill since, oh, about 1876.

This type seems to think that if he were suddenly blown through a wormhole in time and dropped in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territories just after the Civil War with nothing but the clothes on his back and a Swiss Army knife he’d show up back here a year later, rich as Croesus, having dug a gold mine out of the mountainside with his spoon and fork and corkscrew attachments and incidentally having invented the telephone, the electric light bulb, the internal combustion engine, and time travel.

Actually, Lance is on something of a roll of late. Today, the stunt restaurant and why it’s bad.

Something I’ve long believed about television, Gawker speaks out loud: It’s time for TV’s old guard to retire. As someone between the age of Morley Safer and Lisa Ling, I’m of two minds. While I think it’s admirable many of these folks are still swingin’ decades past conventional retirement age, it’s unsettling to turn on “60 Minutes” and see Andy Rooney, still at it at 91. I thought that figure — Rooney’s age — was an outlandish exaggeration on Gawker’s part, but no. He’s really 91. Of course, I never liked Andy Rooney, and the compliment that always made me wince back in my columnizing days was this: “I like your column. It’s sort of a combination of Erma Bombeck and Andy Rooney.” Gee, thanks.

Hey, look — someone just sent me an invitation to a premiere screening of “You Don’t Know Jack” tomorrow night, a little perk of being tangentially connected to the creative community in the location where it was shot. Too bad I can’t go. Working. To afford my HBO, where the film will eventually screen in my living room. Ah, well.

I’ve been sitting here for 45 minutes, pinging around the web, looking for inspiration. Friends? It isn’t out there, or if it is, I don’t know where it might be. Meanwhile, a lovely day is in progress, and I need to take out the trash. You want bloggage? That I have:

I want it on the record: If, when my daughter is grown, she dresses like, acts like, grooms herself in imitation of, or otherwise appears to be influenced by Kim Kardashian’s entire gestalt in any way, shape or form, I will consider myself a failure.

Sweet Juniper: Your forsythias don’t care you’re gone.

I have agreed to do craft services (i.e., provide food for) a friend’s short film production for one day next month. Meals: 2. Crew/cast head count: 36. Vegetarians: 3. Vegans: 0. Kitchen facilities: Still unknown. Suggestions welcome. I’m in a mood to wow someone. I’m thinking a big ol’ mess of carnitas with enough beans and roasted vegetables to satisfy the non-carnivores. But if you have a better idea, I’d like to hear it.

Rahm Emanuel says he wants to be mayor of Chicago someday. How do the Chicagoans in the room feel about that?

The Pope’s cologne.

To the gym.

I wish I could afford/had time to travel more, but it’s almost always good to be home. I’m glad that at this late point in life, I finally got a chance to see Las Vegas. It was as advertised, and not, although complaining about false advertising in a city where everything is fake, from the smiles to the boobs to the hospitality — that’s like complaining about the weather. It’s just the way it is. Deal.

What I liked: The glorious absurdity of the place. That you could get a drink anywhere, at any time of day. The look of the MGM Grand lion at sunset:

Fremont Street. Hoover Dam. The dancing waters at the Bellagio:

Watching Kate play “Anarchy in the U.K.” to an audience of prisoners on Guitar Hero in the arcade at Bally’s:

Among other things. What I didn’t like: The way the maps lie. (“Across the street” means “half a mile away.”) The way the old business model — everything’s cheap as long as you don’t mind seedy — has given way to one in which nothing is cheap, but it’s still most of the way to seedy, just the high-gloss, breast-implant variety of seedy. Great restaurants, but frightfully expensive. Fancy hotels, crammed with people gawking at the fanciness. Like the Bellagio lobby ceiling:

Finally, I grew weary of being nickel-and-dimed. It’s true you can do anything in Vegas, at any hour of the day or night, but it’ll cost you. Everyone has a hand in your pocket, and every inch of the place is designed to empty them as quickly and efficiently as possible. For instance: Someone told me I wouldn’t be able to take Kate into a casino, and so I’d be doing a lot of detouring. Scoff. You can take kids into casinos all you want. (According to law, they can’t “loiter” there.) We walked past more slot machine and blackjack tables than we did fat people. You have to walk through the casino to get anywhere. (They have slot machines in daycare centers, I am certain.) Add-on fees are everywhere; our friends Clark and Aimee were charged a daily fee at their hotel for, no kidding, electricity. A simple ATM withdrawal — from a bank’s machine, not one of those private things — costs $5. I know that staff works for tips, but by the third day, all the forelock-tugging grew wearisome. My last act of defiance was to stiff the valet at our hotel as we were checking out; I had no small bills, and damn if I was going to give him a tenner for putting my suitcase into a taxi. Sorry, bub.

Filmapalooza was OK, a little thin, but the talk by Jason Reitman was quite enjoyable:

I asked him about shooting in Detroit. He said if Detroit could do for the city what it did for its airport, it would have no problems whatsoever. From a visual perspective, he’s right. He talked a little about subject and theme, although he called it “location and the deeper thing.” “Thank You for Smoking” was about a lobbyist for a vile industry, but the deeper thing was freedom of choice. “Juno” was about teen pregnancy, but it was really about innocence and growing up.

Everything I need to know about writing I already learned in the newspaper business.

And the NAB show, the National Association of Broadcasters, the show to which Filmapalooza adhered, was a wonder. Acres and acres and acres of whiz-bang doo-dads, lights and cameras and action and software. Everyone’s showing a 3D television rig — no thanks, anyway — but the thing I found most interesting was the big thing in budget filmmaking: Shooting on a single-lens reflex still camera. This guy showed this film, shot entirely on a Canon 5D. You need a lot of SD cards, but who cares when you can carry your whole rig in one hard-side suitcase?

(They’re shooting the final episode of “House” this way.)

I almost bought one of these at a 30 percent discount, and still might. I have until tomorrow to decide. It all depends on how my tax refund shakes out.

And now we are home. Green and cool and blessed humidity. What did I miss when I was gone?

She-Who wants a bendy straw. And you’d better provide one. No, two.

Gene Weingarten won a second Pulitzer? His long-time editor explains how it happened.

The cilantro/soap thing, explained.

On to taxes.