Can’t lie — my mind is rather full of personal stuff at the moment, and not focused at all on blogfodder. It’ll pass, but it makes for slim pickin’s here. The next couple of weeks are going to be busy-like-crazy. The start of classes at Wayne, the North American International Auto Show, a new job — our little co-prosperity sphere will be full up with things-that-aren’t-this. Oh, and the cherry on the sundae? We’re going to the Charity Preview next Friday, courtesy of the paper. And that is? A night of black-tie swellishness, the biggest benefit of the year, when everybody in town welcomes the auto show and raises jillions for children’s charities. My feet hurt just thinking about it.

I went to the dress department at one of the department stores after Christmas. Everything was on sale and the racks looked like they’d been looted. I tried on four dresses and hated them all — I didn’t wear a floor-length dress to my own wedding, for crying out loud. So I guess it’ll be a cocktail dress and I’ll spend a lot of time standing behind Cadillacs so no one knows I’m cheating.

Eh, it’ll be fine. Alan’s not wearing a tux. And once Aretha arrives, all eyes will be on her. That photo caption is wrong, by the way — that’s her longtime boyfriend, not her husband, although she announced this week they’re finally getting married this summer. A few years ago, they rolled into the Charity Preview in his-and-her white mink.

(A friend saw her shopping at Kroger a few years ago, in sable. Sable and a baseball cap.)

Oh, and guess what she said in the press release about the engagement? “No, I’m not pregnant.” Ha.

So, a quick skip to the bloggage?

I can’t stand shows like “Wife Swap,” but I’m sort of sorry I missed this one.

Newt Gingrich: Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds. Maybe.

Eric Zorn echoes my call of a year or so back — leave the lights for a while after the holidays — although I gotta tell you, everything in and outside the house came down on Jan. 1. It was either take them down then, or they’d stay up until February. And I have to tell you, by February? You’re definitely in the lazy-bum camp.

And that’s it for me. Enjoy Thursday, when the world starts to smell distinctly of? Weekend!

I’m a big believer in food therapy, although the older I get the less often it takes the form of eating a bowl of raw cookie dough. One of the new activities I spoke of yesterday requires me to drop Kate off downtown at 6 p.m. on Wednesdays, which is a strange time. If I head back out to the ‘burbs I run into after-work traffic, and so I look for stupid little errands to burn time until it thins out. Check out a possible bike route, buy a dozen tamales in Mexicantown, whatever. Yesterday I popped into a venerable downtown bar/restaurant called Cliff Bell’s.

Mmm, happy hour. (But I can’t drink on weeknights.) Not too crowded. Lovely venue, restored in 2006 to its full Art Deco glory. Framed newspaper articles in the foyer outside the ladies’ describe it as a former speakeasy, or “blind pig” in the local jargon. It also says it opened in 1935, two years after Repeal. Well, I guess it could have been a blind pig before that — there were certainly enough of them. More fascinating fact: Blind pigs were the source of 50,000 jobs at their peak during Prohibition. Fifty thousand! That earns them a place at any economic-development table in my world.

But today is 2011, and the drinks are considerably more expensive. I saw complaining on Yelp about $12 martinis but as I said, I wasn’t drinking. I looked over the menu and saw just what the doctor ordered: Steak and eggs. It came in the form of a petite filet on a small potato cake, topped with a runny one sunny side up, napped with bernaise. It was raining and chilly outside, and all that warm protein just hit the spot.

On the way home, I took a few side streets to the freeway and watched a lone cyclist cross my path — no lights, dark clothing, with what appeared to be half a dozen hula hoops carried crosswise across his body, but a closer look revealed them to be insulated cable of some sort. A scrapper taking his treasure to the yard. I bet he won’t be enjoying the steak and eggs at Cliff Bell’s anytime soon.

How did the morning slip away again? I’ll tell you how: Editing copy. My reporters are young, they’re inexperienced, and they don’t always deploy their adjectives with care. May I also add that their only role models in pop culture are TV types, and every time one of these show ponies asks, “And how did that make you feel?” before tipping the mic in the subject’s direction, God kills a kitten. At the very least He gives me another story to fix, written by someone who thinks that’s how you do journalism.

I shouldn’t talk. My students teach me something every day, and seeing them grow over time is genuinely rewarding. One I would have written off a year ago called me a couple weeks back, shaking with excitement over being sent to New York to cover Occupy Wall Street. The story he filed was better than anything he ever wrote for me. I hope I had something to do with it.

But now I must away, and I will not be in my regular place tomorrow. I’m off for a weekend of R&R in an undisclosed location, although I’m sure there’ll be photos. But tomorrow at 10:30 a.m., I hope to be looking at Detroit from a rapidly ascending airplane.

Meanwhile, here was the most eye-opening story from last night’s health beat:

Expectant mothers are more likely to die from murder or suicide than from several of the most common pregnancy-related medical problems, a U.S. study said.

You don’t say.

One of my Facebook friends posted this video two days ago, on the birthday of Father Charles Coughlin. Remarkable in many ways, but perhaps mostly for the casual use of “voluble” in a newsreel script. But how did he feel? Also note the use of dramatic reenactment.

I have to go. I hope it’s not raining where you are, because it sure is here.

…has gone Hollywood.

I’ve never watched an episode of “Two and a Half Men” in my life and my interest in the second generation of the Actin’ Sheens is pretty much nil, but I gather Charlie Sheen’s public meltdowns are the best thing to happen to guerrilla humor since Sarah Palin.

No sooner had I chuckled through the Sheen Family Circus yesterday than I was alerted to Charlie Sheen in New Yorker cartoons. This story has developed quickly enough — sorry, you couldn’t pay me enough to watch him on “20/20″ — that half the lines are going over my head. There are people who have the industrial-strength new-media skilz to monitor two dozen websites and Twitter feeds, but I’m not among them. Not if I’m going to have time to browse Cute Overload once in a while.

But I did take a few minutes and watch most of the clip at this Salon link, mainly because the headline irritated me; whatever else Charlie Sheen is, he’s not “frightening.” The haggard face, the cigarette in the teeth — he reminds me of the guys I used to meet in those summers during college, when my friends and I would go to different apartment-complex pools during the day. (We didn’t know anyone who lived there. That was sort of the point.) I bet he has a funny name for his penis. I bet he calls it “little Elvis” or “the Highlander.”

Back to the humor. This is sort of second-rate, but it contains at least one new fact (to me) — the Plaza Hotel has an Eloise suite. Of course they would, but the thought of Charlie and his goddesses partying there is rahther sobering, as Eloise might say. This who-said-it quiz provided one of my rare humiliations in the area of online quiz-taking (I am an Oxford don of online quizzes. Go on, Pew Center, try to stump me!).

Is this sort of bad behavior really so different from previous episodes of bad behavior? Then why are so many people who clearly have better things to write about writing about it? Why am I writing about it?

I liked this comment at Walter Kirn’s blog:

Like Hugh Hefner. Sheen’s flashing, haunted eyes, the nodding head, the sidelong, you-better-believe-it-pal, meaningful looks at his interviewers, all remind the spectator of the panhandler, the street hustler, the drunk tank cell mate, the it’s-reeeally-heavy-maa-an tedium of the Dennis Hopper character in “Apocalypse Now.” And finally, the drunk ranter in every bar in every town. Yeah, pal, you’re brilliant. You’re really special. And you know things ordinary mortals don’t. I gotta go now. We see our reduced selves and recoil.

He left out the way he rattles a rocks glass before he tries to drain it of the last few drops. That’s another thing those guys would do on their poolside chaises.

And Ken Levine’s post isn’t hugely insightful, but kudos for this shoutout to “A Face in the Crowd,” the closest thing to a literary reference you find in showbiz, most days.

My word counter says we’re at 500 on the nose, so let’s skip to the bloggage:

This story was done by one of my students. I pass it along because until I moved to Michigan, I’d never seen a hookah lounge before, let alone one in a strip mall called Off the Hookah. This one sounds like a sports bar for Arab men.

Clint Eastwood is directing a script about J. Edgar Hoover, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. So there. Soooo. Theerrrre.

Oh, and note the lead in that story, which admittedly is from E! Online and not the New Yorker. I think Hank Stuever once noted that stories about movies featuring gay characters always feature a passage about kissing — what was it like to kiss another man, Leo? Was it difficult? How did you prepare? As though a simple kiss is the equivalent of losing 60 pounds and shooting a lengthy scene in which one swims a river of shit. No one ever asks that of the hookers who bang Charlie Sheen.

If you’re not reading the NYT’s Disunion blog, you should be. We’re only a few weeks away from the attack on Fort Sumter.

And is that it? I think it is. Off to the gymnasium.

Finally, the Midwest is getting its very own snowpocalypse. The word went out over the weekend, prompting a stampede to groceries and liquor stores, so as to be fully stocked for the forecast foot of snow. Yes, a foot. Accuweather says it could be more. But Accuweather — feh. Scary maps, but two feet of snow? I’ll believe it when I see it.

Less hysterical forecasts say it will top out at eight inches. Eight inches or 12, we’re in for a screwin’. I plan to retain my equanimity. The snow will be followed by bitter cold and high winds. Yay, a blizzard. It’s times like this I’m glad I live in a city. Less panic buying in the groceries, for one thing, although I’m running low on bread and chances are, when I stop to get some today, all that will be left is Hillbilly brand high-fiber.

A forecaster — an actual meteorologist, not one of those TV guys, but someone who works for the National Weather Service — told me that forecasting is never more than an educated guess, and all the fancy technology has done is lengthen the guessing window, not improve accuracy. A three-day forecast then, a 10-day forecast now, but it’s still just a guess. I find that oddly comforting. In the meantime, I liked this map from the comments thread of that Gawker link, above:

How was your weekend? Mine was some work, some play, but I still feel like a dull girl today. Watched “The Wicker Man,” the original, not the Neil LaBute remake, and friends? That was some freaky shit. Full of ’70s hair, ’70s filmmaking technique, ’70s attitudes and, just for you gentlemen, a lengthy Britt Ekland nude scene. Photo at the link; I think that woman had the most perfect breasts in Christendom. Or pagandom. Or wherever. If you read past Britt’s boobs at that link, you’ll come across some plot spoilers. I had the advantage of knowing basically nothing about the film going in, beyond that it was remade by LaBute, Mr. Happy, and that the original had a cult following. I see why.

I wish I could see more movies that way — before I’d read a word about them. But if you have to parcel out your time, you really have to rely on reviews to decide what’s worth it. Roger Ebert’s review of “Monster” notes that he had no idea who was playing the lead until he saw her name in the credits. Oh, to have that sort of virginal experience with anything in pop culture these days. Can’t do it. Thanks in no small part to bloggers like me.

OK, so let’s get some bloggage down, so I can commence the week. We have a car theme going on today, what with Gene Weingarten’s cover story in the WashPost Sunday magazine yesterday. He took the Chevy Volt out for a several-thousand-word test drive. Because it’s Weingarten, and because it’s several thousand words, it’s about a lot more than the car, and worth a read.

And I hope the Wall Street Journal has left this link on the free side of the paywall, because it’s pretty doggone amusing, a review of the new Cadillac station wagon. I used to subscribe to Car & Driver for writing like this:

Let’s say you bought this car, a Cadillac CTS-V Sport Wagon, with a 6.2-liter, 556-horsepower Corvette V8, six-speed manual transmission, magnetorheological dampers (I’ll get to that), Michelin SP2 gumballs, 15-inch front Brembo brakes with six-pot calipers, and microsuede wrapping on the steering wheel and shifter. Well, first of all, you’d be one strange cat, which is to say, unusual. Notwithstanding any nitro-burning ice-cream trucks or flying boattail Rollses in your neighborhood, this wagon is about as esoteric an automobile as you’re likely to find. Statistically speaking, General Motors will sell exactly none of these cars, the Detroit equivalent of Zoroastrianism.

It gets better from there. But when you’re writing about a car that has a freakin’ G-meter in the instrument cluster, you better.

And with that, I must fly. Monday, etc. So we commence a snowy week. Let’s hope it lives up to the billing.

Yeesh, what a morning. I decided to take time to absorb the morning newspapers in all their deceased-tree glory, really pay attention and be-here-now and all that, and what did it get me? Behind. That’ll teach me.

And now, since I have about a million edits to do before 1 p.m., let’s toss up some links and let you guys get the party started, eh?

This story flapped around like a dying carp for a few hours yesterday, and I still cannot believe it: The American Spectator calls Shirley Sherrod a liar for saying one of her relatives was lynched. I simply refuse to link to the original material; you can find it elsewhere. But Josh Marshall captures it succinctly:

This one’s really one for the history books under the subheading of right-wing #outragefail, as the young folks might put it. (Writer Jeffrey) Lord starts off vaguely sympathetic and works up into a crescendo of high-dudgeon because Sherrod says her relative was lynched when in fact he was arrested by a sheriff and then beaten to death on the courthouse steps while allegedly resisting arrest even though he remained handcuffed through the fatal beating.

I am shocked, shocked that anyone would think any part of the right wing has racist elements.

Haven’t checked in on Sweet Juniper for a while; apparently he’s been canning and camping and — Jesus Christ, Jim — making a homemade sleeping bag? But there’s always interesting action over there if you check the sidebars. And whaddaya know? This photo is evidently not Photoshopped. But this was the week’s show-stopper for me:

We are the annoying people who come to your kid’s birthday party with homemade presents. It’s okay for now I guess, but in a few years, when your kid wants Legos and we bring hand-sewn madras shorts or something, it’s going to be really embarrassing for our own children.

No, Jim. It’s embarrassing for the other parents at the party who didn’t give, along with the homemade present, a custom photo book of a story featuring the homemade present and the birthday boy and all the rest of it. Damn overachievers.

Do you have Planet Money bookmarked, and do you listen to their podcasts? If not, you should. By the way, when Mitt Romney said “liberal policies” destroyed his family home in Detroit, recently leveled by bulldozers? I think this is a far more likely narrative.

Richard Cohen sort of embarrassed himself today, regarding the Wikileaks doc dump. Mitch Albom sounds a lot like this, too, when he dismisses “internet blogging,” as he did in his own recent cane-shake, at Andrew Breitbart. And Bob Greene is still sitting in a hotel room, still trying to draw grand conclusions from trivial observations. This has been your edition of Print Dinosaurs at Play in the Tar Pits for today.

And I’m off to spin straw into… if not gold, at least something readable. Later.

Can’t decide whether to ride my bike to this morning’s meeting. Sun is out, skies are clear after a bangin’ thunderstorm last night, but the temperature’s going right back to 90 again today. Which means I’ll arrive a sweaty mess, but? It’s summer, and it already feels too short. I’m going.

Maybe I’ll swing by Grosse Pointe South High School on my way home, see if any movie trucks are there. They’re shooting something called “LOL” with Demi Moore and Miley Cyrus. “Scream 4″ is shooting nights somewhere in the Farms, at some rich person’s giant house. And there have been Hugh Jackman sightings here and there; he’s making “Real Steel” in the neighborhood, as well.

“Real Steel” with Hugh Jackman — it only sounds like a porno movie. It’s sci-fi, something about robots. The dirty version will star Jack Hugeman. It’s one crazy Hollywood summer here for sure.

Since I have to leave early, a boring vacation slide show. I finally got around to uploading our Montreal pictures.

This is the Basilique Notre Dame de Montreal. We enforced a rule that no one was permitted to call it “the church where Celine Dion got married.” You are similarly forbidden:

One afternoon drenching rains drove us into the contemporary art museum. They were hosting some sort of avant-garde film exhibit, empty room after empty room showing stupid film loops. I was far more interested in the atmospherics of the dark rooms than anything else. Kate contemplates Art:

A bike ride out to the islands took us past Habitat 67. If Stalin had a sense of humor, this is the sort of concrete housing he’d have built in the Soviet Union:

The Jazz festival was just getting under way when we were there. There are guidebooks:

“Pour les nuls.” Doesn’t “dummy” cross all languages? I guess not.

Some bloggage for the table? Sure:

Has the leak really stopped? I’m skeptical. Extremely.

Is Mark Williams for real? This guy is taken seriously? Are you kidding me?

Kwame Kilpatrick finally cops a feel on the woman he’s supposed to be touching — and gets written up for it.

Time to slurp coffee and run out the door. Have a great weekend, all.

Michigan being one of the last states to start school — by law, it cannot start before Labor Day, the rather thin legislative legacy of my last state representative — it’s among the last to finish, too. The teachers have to oversee their unruly herds for 4.5 more days, including today, and I don’t envy them, because the corrals are in danger of being kicked to pieces. In keeping with the livestock theme, I hope they were all issued cattle prods after Memorial Day.

No, that’s not fair. The end of the school year is as important as any other part of it, even if the tone is distinctly different. Yesterday’s science class was the time-honored Mentos-and-Diet Coke experiment, and next week in math class, they’ll be watching a movie.

“What movie?” the cinéaste parent queried.

“I don’t know.”

“A math movie?” I pressed.

“Who would make a movie about math?” she replied.

Oh, child. How young you are. I’d sign a parental R-rating waver waiver [Yoinks! -- ed.] if the teacher screened Pi. Or “Good Will Hunting,” or “A Beautiful Mind,” for that matter. “Stand and Deliver,” “Proof” — there’s no shortage of possibilities, but my guess is, they’ll probably watch something bland and PG, and it’ll likely be “The Blind Side.”

Are there any documentaries about math and its close relationship with madness? Surely that ground has been plowed. Ted Kaczynski was a mathematician, remember, a PhD from Michigan. Go Blue. Many years ago, the New Yorker ran a long profile of two deeply eccentric Russian brothers, one of whom lives in an apartment where they do nothing but tend to a supercomputer that calculates pi, endlessly.

How long will it take Google to find it for me after I type “russian brothers who calculate pi” into my search window? Point-one-seven seconds. Some Russians used their math prowess to more profitable ends. You want a movie? Your head could explode just thinking about stuff like this:

Around the three-hundred-millionth decimal place of pi, the digits go 88888888—eight eights pop up in a row. Does this mean anything? It appears to be random noise. Later, ten sixes erupt: 6666666666. What does this mean? Apparently nothing, only more noise. Somewhere past the half-billion mark appears the string 123456789. It’s an accident, as it were. “We do not have a good, clear, crystallized idea of randomness,” Gregory said. “It cannot be that pi is truly random. Actually, a truly random sequence of numbers has not yet been discovered.”

Not long after this article was published, “Northern Exposure” had an episode in which a young woman blows through Cicely, Alaska, doing this very same work. She is lovely and sane, not Russian and a little bonkers. Which goes to show “Law & Order” writers aren’t the only ones who rip from the headlines.

More math/movie strangeness: Schlock director Paul Verhoeven has a doctorate in math. I hope the class won’t be watching “Showgirls.”

Does today have a theme? Let’s just cut to the damn bloggage, eh?

This South Carolina Senate situation gets weirder by the moment:

Indeed, in a three-hour interview, the unemployed military veteran could not name a single specific thing he’d done to campaign. Yet more than 100,000 South Carolinians voted for him on Tuesday, handing him nearly 60 percent of the vote and a resounding victory over Vic Rawl, a former judge who has served four terms in the state legislature.

“I’m the Democratic Party nominee,” Greene says in the interview at his father’s home on a lonely stretch of rural highway in central South Carolina. “The people have spoken. The people of South Carolina have spoken. The people of South Carolina have spoken. We have to be pro-South Carolina. The people of South Carolina have spoken. We have to be pro-South Carolina.”

Someone punch that guy’s reset button.

A strange piece of e-mail arrived last night, from “Information Technician,” i.e. service -at- vh4rs.com. Subject line: The information you requested. No links within. No attachments. WHOIS lookup ambiguous. The contents of the e-mail, in its entirety:

Recipe: Overnight Fruit Salad

1. Place cabbage on bottom of large salad bowl.
2. Top with pineapple chunks, mandarin orange sections, grapes and raisins. Sprinkle cheese atop.
3. Combine yogurt and sour cream; spread over salad, sealing to edge of bowl
4. Cover and refrigerate for 4 to 24 hours. If desired, garnish with lemon and lime twist, curly endive, and a grape.

I wonder if this is some sort of extremely baroque virus. I wonder, if I prepare and consume this fruit salad, if I will be turned into a zombie. Whatever, I think two cups of dressing sounds like way too much, even for this much cabbage and fruit. What’s the verdict of the crowd?

Whatever, it’s time for me to get a-movin’. Second wind is in progress! The weekend awaits!

UPDATE: No, wait, one more, for any of your Fort Wayners who recall Charles’ Pugh’s brief time as a TV reporter in town. Now that he’s council president here in the D, he’s moved on to costing taxpayers even more money than his salary and the city car he wrecked his first month in office. For his bodyguard. Every Detroit resident I know manages to find their way around the city at all times of day without hired muscle, using naught but their common sense. Not this waste of oxygen. I ask you.

A couple of days on one topic, and the bloggage piles up. So let’s hop to it, shall we? There’s some good stuff here:

First, the Palin family continues to stain the nation’s carpets as young Bristol mama-sees-mama-does herself into a potentially lucrative career as a public speaker. Her fee is said to be somewhere between $15K-$30K, depending on “what she has to do to prepare” to speak on such topics as abstinence claptrap and anti-abortion claptrap. Hey, you know what index cards cost these days? Sorry, that’s editorializing. I’m choosing not to be upset by this, as the sorts of groups who would pay such a fee very likely need to be separated from their money somehow. Also, Bristol needs to start her five-school college education odyssey one of these days, and needs the bucks for tuition. My only regret is, this increases the chances we’ll see her on regular old non fee-paying media. One more reason to confine my media consumption to NPR exclusively.

Also, the don’t-make-fun-of-public-figures’-families rule no longer applies. Not that it stopped anyone, but good lord, when you ask for it like this…

The people who came up with the Bacon Explosion evidently have Google alerts, because I was copied on their e-mail notification that they have sampled the KFC Double Down sandwich, found it lacking, and monkeyed with it. How? By adding a slice of Bacon Explosion, sillypants. Taste test and many photographs here.

I’m a sucker for a certain kind of liberal patriotism, and this story, about the United Nations of Hamtramck High preparing for its senior prom, touched me. DetNews columnist Neal Rubin calls Hamtramck “absurdly diverse,” and it is, more diverse than an after-school special:

“You tell ‘em, ‘It’s something seniors do,’ ” says Mohamed Algehaim, 18, the class secretary. He was born here, but his parents are from Yemen, and the part about the tuxedo took some work, too.

“If you’re the first child, it’s harder to get across,” says Emina Alic, 18, the Bosnia-born class president. “If your brothers and sisters already went, your parents tell you you’re going.”

The 200 current seniors had read the memo early on. “There’s competition between classes,” says class historian Sabbir Noor, 17, whose roots go back to Bangladesh…

Throw in the Poles who still live in the old neighborhood, the African Americans who moved there in their own flight from Detroit and the rest of the ethnic fruit salad, and you get a sense of the place.

Moving on, a few couples who will not want to hyphenate their names.

Finally, it can be told: This is the project I’ve been working on since January, the 75th anniversary book for the Detroit Economic Club. It’s a custom-publishing job, i.e., work-for-hire, but it was really interesting and I count myself lucky to have gotten the gig. The DEC is a noontime speaker’s club, but one of the most sought-after podiums in the country, and lemme tell you, they have heard from everyone. (Except the Palin family.) I had full access to their archive at the Detroit Public Library, and it was pretty cool, going through files of correspondence with letters from people like Richard Nixon and Henry Ford II. The story of Detroit in the 20th century was the story of America, and it was fascinating to see who came to town and what they had to say when they got here. It certainly left me with some new ideas about how we learn history.

Anyway, the anniversary celebration starts tonight, I have to write about it for the book, and I need to throw together an outfit that won’t disgrace me in front of the movers and shakers. Both the News and Freep did stories pegged to it.

I also have an early meeting tomorrow morning, so this may have to serve for the week’s blogging. One question I leave you with: Where’s Coozledad? He hasn’t spoken up for a few days. Did he get kicked by a mule?

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.