If’s fashionable to call Detroit a third world country in the midst of the United States, but really — that’s unfair to the third world.

Take the time to browse the photo gallery. It’s simply beyond belief.

My sister buys and sells glass and ceramics, sometimes on eBay. She sent me this. Now I’m sending it to you. If you’re singing it in your head for the rest of the day, well, you’ve got company.

Nice big jugs, the video.

Floor drains in the basement backing up? Check.

Dog needs to go to the vet? Check.

Deadline stretched to breaking point, necessitating concentrated period of morning work? Check.

You get the idea. See you sometime this afternoon.

I think I mentioned our dryer died. From the distant clanks coming from the basement, I suspect Alan’s trying to fix it right now. I did my part yesterday — driving to Roseville to pick up a switch that turned out not to be the problem. (Of course. It was simple and inexpensive. We’ll have a new dryer by week’s end, I predict.)

On the way, I started woolgathering about machines.

Alan’s a good partner to have in a household because he understands machines at a level I never did. He grew up in a working-class family, where a core value is you never pay someone to do what you can do yourself. As a teenager, he campaigned a motocross racer, needless to say at a level where you don’t have a pit crew. So when something breaks, he approaches the problem the way he would any other, by breaking down the components, the chain of connections that make the thing work, and tries to find the failure. What is a dryer? A drum that turns while hot air is blown through it. What are its essential parts? The motor, the fan, the heater. What’s the nature of the malfunction? It runs and blows, but the air isn’t warm. And so the problem is isolated — it’s something to do with the heater.

On the way out to Roseville, I thought about how few of us really understand how the machines we use work. I thought back to junior high and tried to remember the elements of the internal combustion engine, which we learned in physical science. I was one of only a few girls who got an A on that unit, and I still remember the feeling of wonder at the unlocking of the secret — the valve opens, the mixture sprays in the cylinder, the piston rises, the spark plug ignites, the piston is pushed down, another valve opens and the exhaust exits. My brother was a car guy, and I finally understood all that language he used. Manifold, camshaft, drive shaft, flywheel. I understood carburetion! And I was 14 years old. It was thrilling.

(My proudest moment: I wiggled under my friend Mark’s ’69 Camaro with a wrench and unjammed the shift linkage, based on having seen it done once before. It wasn’t a complicated repair — a good whack to unjam it — but I was the only one who could do it, and everyone cheered when I wiggled back out, because it meant we wouldn’t have to drive home from Sault Ste. Marie in second gear.)

Well, Henry Ford got old and died, and fuel injection replaced carburetion, and it’s safe to say most of my knowledge is obsolete now. I once interviewed a man who had been, at one time, the most sought-after Volvo/Mercedes mechanic in the region. He’d moved up in the world, and now owned a dealership. He said he’d be utterly lost under the hood these days, that it was more electronic than mechanical anymore, and while it made cars unquestionably better in a million ways, he could no longer fix them.

So this is what was on my mind when I got home, and found John and Sam had arrived in my absence. Their new Prius was in the driveway.

They’ve become Prius cult members, more effective salesmen than anyone paid by Toyota. We talked about the marvels of the car — the hybrid synergy drive, the seamless transition between the battery, the electric motor and the gas engine, the keyless entry and starting (you push a button). And then they insisted I drive when we went out to dinner. I tried to navigate the nasty Detroit freeways while maximizing my mileage, aided by the display of animated colored arrows. (Hybrid enthusiasts speak of the fender-benders they tend to have when their cars are brand-new, and they can’t tear their eyes away from the display.)

I stepped on the brake. “You’re think you’re braking, but you’re not,” John said, explaining that the car is smarter than I am, and knows braking is unnecessary, so it’s transferring energy from the brake to the battery, or something like that.

“Look, you have one and a half green cars,” said Sam, switching to the how’m-I-doing mileage display. Apparently it’s good to have green cars, and you try to get more. Driving this car is like being stuck in a video game. And I haven’t even told you about the cable John bought, so he can hook his car up to his laptop, and watch numbers fly by; it’s for the diagnostics when it breaks down, whenever that might be. “Yes, I know, we might have a kernel panic on the freeway. We may have to reboot,” John said with real glee. All his life he’s been waiting for Apple to make everything in his life, and it seems Toyota has come close enough, at least with the car.

This morning they got up before dawn and slipped away in their silent car, and I didn’t even hear them go. I guess I shouldn’t, but I sort of miss carburetion. At least I understood that.

No bloggage today; my fatigue is at the walking-into-walls level, and I have to go buy groceries and dryer parts. How about an entertaining comment caught in the spam net?

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

This might be the best one ever.

Enjoy the day. It’s hot here, so if it’s hot there, keep your radiator cool.

I give up. I’ve composed, and pitched, at least four posts in the last 24 hours. So consider this a placeholder until I get the kinks out.

Yes, we had a nice time. Look, we exposed our daughter to modern art. She’s still fretting over a video installation that disturbed her. They say that used to happen with Picasso. Whatever.

The trip was fine, but the traveling was hell. Weather bought us an extra night in Newark, aka the Paris of the Chemical-Waste Belt.

More later. Let’s see if this Flickr-blog thing works.

On edit: Not crazy about it.

You know what they say about weather in the Midwest, right? This is today.

Not quite noon, facing southeast, near Ford Cove, Lake St. Clair. Temperature: around 20F. Others in evidence: Some ice fishermen and guys trimming trees on the Ford estate. Ice: Firm but a little chatty in places; I played it safe.

It reads: Closed for Labor Day weekend. The party restarts Monday or Tuesday.

In the meantime, you “Deadwood” fans might want to read Lance on the subject: Deadwood and the Libel of George Hearst.

Sometimes you just want the TV on for background noise. Volume at a low murmur, a moving painting pushed up against the wall. It’s not too distracting that way. I’ve also found it’s pretty much the perfect way to appreciate “Scarface.”

It was on AMC last night. I never watch movies on AMC — there are commercials, and the profanity is scrubbed, but last night I was paying 98 percent of my attention to something else, and besides, it’s “Scarface.” The worst movie ever made. You think losing a few f-bombs is going to hurt the experience?

But actually, I came away from this multitask-aided viewing sort of liking it. How the hell could that happen? I dunno; maybe because I paid attention to the women this time. I liked seeing scrawny, slight-breasted women like Michelle Pfeiffer and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in plunging necklines. (Nowadays Posh Spice is the model.) I liked Mastrantonio’s ridiculous Afro, and the scene where Pfeiffer listens to her husband crab about everything while he takes a bath. (She sits at her vanity, polishing her nails and tooting cocaine, which seems the right strategy.) Of course, I loved the stupid accents: Toe-nee, we jost got mah-reed yesterday! We were goin’ to soo-prize you!

And, of course, I liked how Miami seems to be entirely populated by young blondes walking down the street in string bikinis. Oliver Stone and Brian DePalma at their best.

It was a short, intense week, but now all my work is done, and it’s Friday! And it’s beautiful! And it’s warm, but not so hot. So I’m giving you this lame-ass entry and a few links:

Lance Mannion speaks for me and many others when he takes note of the tut-tutting over the tone of the Lieberman race — something I’ve paid less than close attention to, although I know it’s pretty ugly — with this cri de blog:

And everybody on down the food chain to the lowliest of the low—I mean me—has again and again expressed their frustration, dismay, and anger at the way insider pundits, politicians, and analysts insist on covering politics as if they live in a universe where Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Roger Ailes of Fox News (not the good Roger Ailes) and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, and before them Lee Atwater, Morton Downey Jr, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Joe McCarthy, and Father Coughlin, had all never been born and as if the poisoned state of political debate was the Democrats’ doing, a bug they keep catching because they refuse to wear their galoshes in the rain and then pass along by not covering their mouths when they cough.

Uh-huh.

The proprietor of Detroitblog is a secretive fellow (he obscured his WHOIS entry), and I suspect for good reason: Evidence suggests he’s a journalist in the employ of one of the dailies, and if word leaked to his bosses that he was blogging on the side, they’d perform their usual First Amendment-inspired clampdown on his right to free expression. Because everyone knows that once you go to work for the princely salary a newspaper pays, they OWN you, brother, you and EVERY WORD YOU WRITE.

Oh, I digress. Anyway, he has a lovely post up, with pictures, on the encroachment of the urban prairie in inner-city Detroit. He had permalinks for a while, but no more, but he doesn’t update often, so if you just go here, I’m sure the post will be at the top for at least a few days.

We almost bought one of these four or five years ago, when we came to the Ann Arbor art fairs from Indiana. It was, however, at that precise moment that, with the sun beating down on my head like a blunt instrument, I said, “If I don’t get out of the sun and into some air-conditioning right this instant, I’m going to faint here in the street.” And so we ducked into a restaurant, and somehow lost interest in the retablos being sold by Nicario Jiminez, a Peruvian artist who now lives in Florida.

This year we planned better, and reached Jiminez before the sun did its damage. Ours is from his Mask Maker’s Workshop series. It’s small, but the detail is amazing:

I just love it.