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.

Eighties nostalgia is all the rage these days. I told Alan the other night that “Hot Tub Time Machine” was probably sold on the basis of the title alone, but now that I know it’s about the ’80s, maybe not. Everyone wants to wear their hair in those cantilevered bang-poufs again, don’t they? Skinny ties, anyone?

For something a little different, I suggest you watch “Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals” on HBO instead. I caught a few minutes the other day, and was interested enough to watch the whole thing on demand a few days later. (For someone who pays zero attention to sports, that’s something.) You want ’80s hair, ’80s glasses, ’80s TV graphics? You got ’em. In the bargain, you get some ’80s Midwest, especially Indiana. You can wallow in it.

The title is the story — a look at the love/hate relationship between Magic Johnson and Larry Bird that stretched from college rivalries to NBA head-knocking, and like all great head-to-head matchups, transcends it all and ends up being about Something More. That part, the something-more part, feels a little tacked on, if only because you get the idea the main players didn’t give a crap about race relations, ginned-up-for-TV conflicts and clips from Spike Lee films, but just when you feel the rivets popping, the narrative skips back to clips of behind-the-back passes and arcing jump shots, and who can’t get with that?

My attention was taken more by Bird, who was at the apex of his career when I arrived in Indiana, a source of great state pride, the embodiment of all of Indiana’s beliefs about itself — not handsome, but approachable; not flashy, but hard-working; not a showboat, but a team player; not Showtime, but Grindstone. And so on. I was probably the last person in America to learn that Larry Bird mowed his own lawn in Boston, frequently with an audience of fans watching from the curb. How quintessentially Indiana, the poor boy’s reluctance to pay good money for something he can do himself in less than an hour. What else was he going to do? Read a book?

Johnson, on the other hand, was a Michigan kid, one who learned his work ethic from his father, who worked at General Motors, back when that was the dream of every blue-collar man in Michigan. Magic was another homebody who stayed close to home for college, and ended up on the other coast, goggle-eyed that in Los Angeles, you could have your own orange tree.

You could have a lot of things in L.A., it turned out, including six women in your bed at once, and we all know how that turned out for him. Bird hurt his back building his mother’s driveway back in French Lick — why pay good money for something you can do yourself? — and that was his turning point. All sports careers have to end sometime, and you could hardly pick two more fitting endings for those players.

But this was my favorite part: When the two were persuaded to shoot a sneaker commercial together, and did it in French Lick, at Bird’s mother’s house, where Larry had built a full-size basketball court to practice on when he was back home again in Indiana. The script made much of how testy their relations were, but when the crew broke for lunch, Bird invited Magic up to the house, where his mother had made lunch for them. Beautiful. There was no mention of the menu, but I bet they had fried chicken and baked beans. Just a hunch.

And now it is spring. Bright sun, etc. I didn’t think I’d live to see it. But here it is, and here’s the bloggage:

One of our GrossePointeToday.com contributors caught a lovely pheasant photo this week. Look at those colors. Pretty, pretty bird.

Wow. This is remarkable. Russell King’s open letter to conservatives. I’m probably the last person to recommend this, but there you are.

Best Twitter joke in a while: #SarahPalinonDiscovery

Off to get my oil changed.

The headline I’ve been waiting to write: Cause of death is electrocution, but not by urine.

Thanks! Noted.

Well, I’ll get an iPad. Eventually. Not this year, but maybe next, when the hard drive gets bigger and the price drops and I start doing all my work in coffee shops. If nothing else, it seems to be the e-reader that might tip me into e-reader territory, not that I’ve been waiting for one. But, you know, I like to keep up. And if the iPad and other tablet devices throw a lifeline to newspapers, then I’ll feel obligated.

You have to be careful, though. I sometimes call my iPod my musical id, because when I started buying music online, I flocked to the shameful hit singles I’d been turning up on the radio all these years, but only when I was alone in the car. Songs I was too cool to like, or songs that were the one decent track made by Disappointing Artist X. I wouldn’t buy DAX’s album, but 99 cents seemed to be the right price point to buy the one or two Madonna songs I enjoy (“Don’t Tell Me,” “Ray of Light”), or Lou Gramm’s “Midnight Blue.” You have earbuds in all the time anyway, so it’s not like anyone knows you’re a secret Eminem fan.

And then digital music became the only music to buy, you hook the iPod to your stereo now, and so I have an iPod cluttered with crap, and more than 1,000 songs to sort into “earbuds only” playlists, lest one pop up at a dinner party and embarrass me. (I downloaded Chakakas’ “Jungle Fever” after watching “Boogie Nights,” OK? And I regret it! I always fast-forward past it!)

I don’t want the same thing to happen with my e-reader. Yesterday I asked Laura Lippman what’s better for her, as an author — ink on paper or pixels on a screen — and she mentioned the obvious use for Kindles, et al:

I use it primarily for travel and I stock it with B-reads, things I don’t care about owning in hardcover format.

In other words, pretty much the way I used my iPod at first.

I also asked Hank Stuever about this, and he got his own blog post out of it, and you should go read that, too.

It’s the newspaper model I’ll be watching most closely, of course. These are my people, they provide my health insurance, and I have a stake in seeing them survive. Late in Hank’s post, he quotes a lovely paragraph from another essay about newspapers, about the authentic experience of actually holding and touching your authentic experiences. I keep coming back to the 3A Tiffany’s ad, running daily in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, upper right-hand corner of the page since forever, and how much I look forward to seeing it every day. The other day it was the engagement-ring ad, four big Tiffany solitaires tumbled in a row. I always take a minute and appreciate it. I will never own a Tiffany’s solitaire. I don’t particularly want one. But it’s a beautiful photo, and I allow myself a few seconds of mild envy, the way if you were walking past Tiffany’s in New York, you might stop to look in the windows, like Audrey Hepburn.

Over to Facebook. Upper-right-hand corner: If you are a 52-year-old driver from Michigan, your car insurance rates can be as low as $14.98 a month. Click to learn more. Earlier today, it told me 52-year-old women could get a free pair of Uggs for participation. Click to learn more. I’ve asked this question a thousand times, and no one can give me a good answer: If all the college-educated eyeballs are online, if the smartest and the wealthiest people are looking at computer screens all day and most of the night, why are the ads the equivalent of the free Amish fireplace?

Oh, and as to the name of the iPad: Are all you people children? When did Beavis and Butthead join the focus group? Do you snicker when you hear “helicopter pad” or “note pad” or “pad Thai?” Maybe because I was always a tampon girl, and grew up in the era when menstrual pads were called “sanitary napkins,” one of the great euphemisms of its day, I don’t immediately associate the word “pad” with menstruation. Grow up.

I also thought Barry’s speech last night was pretty damn good. I liked how he called out the party of No. Fuck you, Sammy Alito, you smug piece of shit. And great job on that GOP response — find the XY equivalent of Martha Coakley, flank him with a black woman and an Asian man, and have them nod and clap on cue. Way to bring it, you soulless toads. I’m sticking with Barry.

OK, then: Yesterday’s work spilled over into today, so I’d best hop to it.

We’ve had a few sunny days this week, sunny and warmish, so of course these must be paid for in blood, and today is the payback — cloudy with a chance of leaden. I started to go for a third cup of coffee and reminded myself to let the first two do their thing before I making the call on a potential stomach-sourer. But if there was ever a day for it…

Despite the sunshine, yesterday sucked the big one all around, didn’t it? The Supreme Court decision promises to be a shit tsunami; about the only good thing I can see coming out of it is the final stripping away of all that who-me?-a judicial-activist? posing by Roberts, Alito, et al.

Actually, I can see other good outcomes, too. If there’s one thing journalism has taught me, it’s this: You never know. You really don’t. Anything can happen to anyone, anytime. One or two election cycles jam-packed with corporate-sponsored lying could lead to a great populist revolt in this country. Scalia could drop dead, with Clarence Thomas throwing himself into the grave right behind him. (“Papa!”) I have faith the Obama administration is not over, not by a long shot.

For now, I’m choosing to be optimistic. It’s really the only one for a day like this.

I have to be out of the house in just a few minutes, so let’s just go to the bloggage and let you guys take it away, eh?

Farewell, Beckham. Tbogg’s dog died yesterday, too.

Via Hank, a conservative dares to speak truth to the conservative movement.

Sometimes, when your side loses, it helps to imagine the opposition in its underwear. Or in other situations where you just know they wish there hadn’t been a camera around. This picture (the festive clambake one, that is; scroll down) has been around forever, but in light of yesterday’s events, let’s make  sure it lives another day, eh?

And now I’m off.

Warning: Major language nerdosity ahead.

There are a bunch of billboards around town right now. Advertising a new smartphone, they proclaim it “a bare-knuckled bucket of does.” Every time I pass, I think of deer. Every time. The ads suggest a certain dystopian menace, and does — as in a deer, a female deer — are not menacing creatures, for the most part. I’m not alone. Language consultant and blogger Nancy Friedman writes:

Only the tagline, buried at the bottom of the ad, solves the riddle: “In a world of doesn’t, Droid does.”

What we have here, folks, is anthimeria gone bad: a verb (third-person, present-tense to do) treated as a noun. And because said verb ends in an S and is spelled exactly the same as a real noun, we end up in a bucketful of don’t go there.

Anthimeria, I learn from further research, is the use of any word that’s normally one part of speech as another. For years I’ve been railing against impact — a NOUN, people, a NOUN — used as a verb: The cuts impacted the teacher’s union, or, if you really want to pile on the 21st century usage, The cuts negatively impacted the teacher’s union.

As frequently happens when the forces of good battle the forces of evil, however, we’re losing. A drugstore display I saw the other day:

Yikes.

In the case of the bucket of does, this might be one case where I’d advocate hip-hop spelling. At least it would make sense that way: bare-nuckled bucket o’ duz, yo.

OK, then. About once a week I feel the need to sleep in, and today was one of them. I’m getting a late start on a busy day, so we’re going to make today a grab bag of this ‘n’ that and links ‘n’ stuff. Ready? Let’s begin with that other always-evolving institution, marriage:

I’m wondering what it would do to the atmosphere at our breakfast table if I marched in one morning and said, I’m telling my lawyer I’d like a hefty seven-figure sum to stay with you. Probably it would crack everyone up, but that’s what you get when you don’t look like Mrs. Tiger Woods in a bikini — comedy.

Jim at Sweet Juniper had an eventful Thanksgiving. Read all about it. May I just pause here and thank the bloggers of the world who write about parenthood and family life as well as Jim does? Say what you will, but very few newspapers ever presented anything as wonderful as that brief essay. Parenthood — or, almost always, motherhood — was either presented Bombeck-style or Albom-style and very rarely like this.

I have a whole rant cued up for the Asian carp issue, probably not one that’s of interest to you people who live outside the Great Lakes, but I’ll spare you today. Just know that once again, we’re learning about the hazards of non-native species introduced into complex ecosystems. The hard way.

Gym, shower, crossword, shopping. I’ve got a whole bucket of does on line today. Have a good one.

Sarah Palin names George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” as one of her favorite books back in the day, when she was a voracious reader. Hey! We have something in common. I liked it, too. I think I was around Kate’s age when I first picked it up. It’s the perfect starter novel for a kid transitioning to adult material, just serious enough to let you know you’re reading something Important, but at its most basic level, simple and easy to follow.

Or as my old colleague Bob once noted, it’s so sad when Boxer dies.

In honor of the five hours of sleep I got last night, in anticipation of a weekend spent lolling and cooking and making birthday cakes and studying Russian vocabulary, just for the hell of it — let’s make today a short one.

Go ahead, laugh, I did: Irish priest kidnapped in Philippines released by MILF. Don’t they have dirty-minded copy editors at the Christian Science Monitor? Or are they just having a laff? You could spend all day writing subheds for that one: Pleads for recapture, say, or Announces engagement, plans to leave priesthood. If you must know without clicking, it’s Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

Worth your while: A 3-D recreation of Capt. Sully’s genius flight, and thanks to crinoidgirl for finding it.

Even cooler: Starlings in flight. About the only time you’re going to see starlings appreciated in this space.

Now I must shop. See you Monday.

I found a notebook yesterday. Nothing like a full software reinstall to send what should stay buried tumbling from the shelves. Keeping notebooks is one of those things all writers are supposed to do, and I sort of do, but not enough. There’s the how-to-carry thing, for one. There’s the atrophied writing muscles thing, for another. And notebooks are dangerous items, not unlike your seventh-grade journals. Scribbling one’s innermost thoughts, or even amusing words, phrases, juxtapositions and church signs contemporaneously inevitably leads to a 99-to-1 chaff/wheat ratio.

(Lance Mannion is an exception. See his Mining the Notebooks tag.)

Anyway, the notebook I found yesterday was from my Ann Arbor year. Danger, Will Robinson. That was the last year I felt boundless optimism and infinite possibilities, before it ended and all the crabs reached up and dragged me back into the bucket. (Yes, I am joking about the crabs. Poor me.) It wasn’t as excruciating to read as I’d feared:

2/10/04: Norwalk virus in a dorm — lines outside the stalls in communal bathrooms, signs on doors reading “sick.”

I have no idea where I got that, as I stayed out of dorms. Probably overheard someone talking about it in class, and just liked the image. I don’t recall my own dorm years as happy, fun ones, although they were instructive. You discover how people really live, and hope you don’t draw a roommate with a vastly different threshold of Gross than yours. Once I walked into a shower and found an empty bottle of disposable douche lying on the floor. Strawberry. Having to line up to barf is all part of the same hell of other people.

Here’s another:

1/28/04: Snow day casualties — Cindy, pale and tired, color bleached from even her lips. Smokers, banished to the outdoors, huddled together like dull sparrows in the cold.

Whoa, poetry. An unattributed quote:

1/20/04: “The golfer plays to save the land from builders.”

Someone should answer for that.

2/18/04: The psychology of oppression: Make members of the oppressed group overseers of the group as a whole. Thus, women initiate others into prostitution, Jews guard others in concentration camps, Hebrews oversee work on the pyramids.

Again, no cite. Notes on watching an onstage interview with Arthur Miller, 4/1/04:

AM on UM: “A testing-ground for all my prejudices.” …30’s theater in NYC: “radical outcry” against the Depression (Welles, Odets) …Never trust an interviewer who uses the word “perspicacious” …”[We] weaned the [Michigan] Daily away from the fraternities.”

But what I remember most without the aid of my notebook, I didn’t even write down: When Miller said that within five years, climate change would change the route of the Gulf Stream and plunge the British Isles into a Siberian ice age. I thought, Hmm, he’s senile. He died not quite a year later.

I suppose my notebook has done what notebooks are supposed to do — prodded memory and data-mined a unique year in my life. Every year is unique, and we forget so much of it. That’s why I started this blog — so I could remember more of it. Ruby just hopped up and nibbled a crescent out of the Arthur Miller page. Another memory.

The last page has a single line: “food and wine.” I have no idea.

OK, then. Another early exit, more scant bloggage:

Hank Stuever has a book coming out this fall. You’d think writing a book would be the hardest part, but it isn’t. He explains.

Finally, I was going to wait for Moe to bring this up herself, but I see the comments in the previous thread have uncovered her recent news, so here goes: Moe, our frequent commenter here, recently got some very bad news about what started as a raspy throat. It’s the kind that includes language like “biopsy” and “stage 3 or 4.” Moe, courage to you on what must be a terrifying journey. Details on her blog.

And now off to my meeting.

Spriggy, 1991-2009

I’ll have more to say about this later. For now, this is just to let his vast fan club know he’s no longer with us.