OK, I watched “Six Feet Under” again, and I decided I was wrong. (Good thing for that last 15 minutes, though, or I would have been right.)

The last montage, I’m now convinced, takes place in Claire’s imagination — hence her starring role in much of it. Not that it matters. Whether the characters end up the way Claire thought they did or some other way, Alan Ball made his big points and drove them home with a sledgehammer: Everything ends. Life surprises. Things never work out the way you think they will, but the way they work out usually works. Best to stay nimble.

Also: Gay men can make wonderful parents.

And did you see the obits? Brenda’s was my favorite: “She developed research methodologies to conclusively prove the link between deviant human behavior and fetal alcohol exposure.” For those who don’t know, Brenda spent several seasons struggling with urges toward promiscuity that were well-nigh pathological. About three episodes ago, her mother had a throwaway line in a scene where she offers Brenda a shot of vodka to “take the edge off” after Nate’s death. Brenda is pregnant and refuses, and her mother says something like, “Oh, one drink won’t hurt anything. Back when I was pregnant all we did was sit around drinking martinis and smoking Parliaments for nine months.”

Layers of inside jokes there.

And nice synchonicity there, HBO. I have to give them credit for the way their shows are supported on the web, particularly the dramas; a day-after visit is almost always worth your while. “Six Feet Under” has/had a great “Inside the Script” feature I liked. “Deadwood” has an interesting feature on costume design. And for “The Wire,” that Russian-novel-of-a-TV-show, has a very useful organizational chart.

While we’re on the arts-and-culture beat, here’s more DetNews blogging from yours truly. The subject: the Stones bring their jillion-dollar road show to town.

Remember the story of a few weeks back, about the memorial to the local soldier who died in Iraq, and the wrangle over how to word it? Ahem:

Unlike earlier wars, nearly all Arlington National Cemetery gravestones for troops killed in Iraq or Afghanistan are inscribed with the slogan-like operation names the Pentagon selected to promote public support for the conflicts. Families of fallen soldiers and Marines are being told they have the option to have the government-furnished headstones engraved with “Operation Enduring Freedom” or “Operation Iraqi Freedom” at no extra charge, whether they are buried in Arlington or elsewhere. A mock-up shown to many families includes the operation names.

Well, I’m glad it’s not just me who thinks “Operation Enduring Freedom” is a stupid way to say “military operations in Afghanistan,” and that it was coined basically to give the war a shiny, Hollywood-ready name. More than that, I’ll just keep my mouth shut, other than to note that in my brief stint as a copy editor, I routinely changed the marketing names to more generic descriptions. In nothing else, I bet most people have forgotten which one Operation Enduring Freedom is.

Lordy, but summer is slipping away. Kate goes back to school in two weeks (muffled huzzahs from her mother), and we’re eagerly awaiting the mailing from the school that will reveal all — who her teacher will be, how many spiral-bound notebooks and boxes of Kleenex she needs to buy. In the meantime, we’re thinking we might make one more trip before it all starts. Details, as they say in the news biz, t.k.

(“t.k.” is AP-speak for “to come.” Makes sense, don’t it?)

You’ve read a version of this before, but…more DetNews blogging.

Oh, look, Eric Rudolph is sorry — at least a little bit:

Convicted serial bomber Eric Robert Rudolph apologized Monday to his victims and their families for his 1996 bombing of Centennial Olympic Park, in which one person died and more than 100 were wounded.

He did not apologize for any of his other attacks, including the bombing of a family planning clinic.

Because they deserved it, the baby-killers. Also, some of them were gay and were probably going to get all gay-married and stuff. Those folks at Olympic park might have been pro-life, just like Eric.

I hope he enjoys eating hot dogs with Terry Nichols. I bet he’s a fun lunch date.

Well, someone’s feeling testy today, eh?

You might say. En route to looking up something else, I found this page from an Islamic swimwear catalog. It’ll give you an idea what “freedom” will look like for women in the new, improved Iraq. Why, some of those sluts are showing their feet! And what’s with those drawstring-waist tunics? Don’t they know the barest suggestion of a female form can drive a man to madness?

Better to burka the lot of ’em, just to be safe.

A bunch o’ bloggage today, I fear, and little else. I was busy, or at least preoccupied:

A moment of silence — and then many more, please — for Dr. Robert Moog, inventor of the synthesizer that bears his name, who died Sunday. Alan hates Emerson, Lake and Palmer, in fact cursed their name just the other day, in his own mild-mannered way: “For one horrible moment I thought they were playing ELP, but it was something else.” I saw them in concert in college, and I remember two things about it — Keith Emerson looked pretty cool in leather pants, and Mark Brunswick did a hilarious impersonation of him later in the student newspaper office, using a typewriter, a Coke machine and a wire-service terminal.

Ah, electronic music. I came of age when it did, and never thought much of it, from “Switched-on Bach” to Kraftwerk. When I think of Yes, I smell marijuana — the two are that closely linked in my mind, from years of sitting in someone’s airless dorm room, forbidden to talk while Rick Wakeman’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” played on the stereo. After a few listenings, I could imitate David Hemmings pretty well: “Voices, voices, voices, they heard voices,” but no one ever wanted to hear it. Maybe, if we were lucky, we’d get an encore of “Long Distance Runaround” or “Roundabout,” during which we could perhaps murmur in quiet conversation, because it wasn’t quite so deep, lyrically: In and around the lake, mountains come out of the sky and they STAND THERRRRRRRE.

You know, it’s amusing for a while, but as Diane Keaton says in “Manhattan,” you get over it.

A few months ago a TV station in New York fired a reporter for getting caught, on an open mic, cursing at some idiots trying to disrupt his live shot. I’d be interested in hearing from any TV journalists who’ve had to deal with situations like this, in which a guy mooned a live shot, unbeknownst to the reporter.

I think it’s pretty funny, myself, but then, I think 90 percent of all local-TV live shots are fairly stupid: Yes, Bill and Monica, I’m standing on a street corner where, a mere five hours ago, a man was shot. Everyone has gone home now — really they went home about four and a half hours ago — but you can see that the corner remains, and I am standing on it. What? What moon? I know of no moon…

Coincidentally, the station in question, WBNS-TV, has a history of live-shot hijinks. One reporter lost his upper plate during a report a few years ago, and not long ago, an anchor was caught on camera flipping the bird, on the set. Must be something in the contracts.

Finally, summer is definitely on its way out. The temps today barely cracked 70, and the light is growing sort of autumnal. I could write a mournful few hundred words about it, but I’ll save that for September.

Today’s DetNews blog entry, in which an Ann Arbor Realtor is caught telling the truth. (I’m trying to make these shorter, but the columnist in me is like an old firehorse — the bell rings, and I want to write 650 words. Also, note my pathetic attempt to make what is essentially a cultural commentary fit into a blog on government and politics, by making that “some say” mention of laws at the end. Stick with me, kid, and I’ll show you all the tricks.)

This was supposed to be the weekend we saw “The Aristocrats,” but alas, the sleepover invitation we were expecting didn’t come, and so it was “March of the Penguins” instead, probably the only G-rated movie I’ll see this year. It was wonderful — how can penguins not be? — but here’s something you may not know about this French-made film, via Terry Lawson’s Freep review: When “March of the Penguins” was shown under its original title at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, it gave various penguins voices, a la “Babe” and allowed them to tell this story through their perspective. It also featured a score more suitable to a 1950s cartoon; that has been replaced by rich, dramatic but unobtrusive orchestrations by Alex Wurman.

If you see the movie you’ll find this fact astonishing — it has the rich, classy, respectful look of a serious nature documentary, and the idea of the birds being anthropomorphized and cartoonified is hard to believe.

Morgan Freeman does the narration in the American version. No funny voices. Good call.

(Pause.) Well! That was quite a “Six Feet Under” finale, wasn’t it?

I didn’t really like it all that much.

Oh, it was OK, but it was a bit…maudlin. I wanted a little more dark humor, but I guess that came in the last 15 minutes. It looked as though Brenda actually died of boredom. If only Billy could be as funny as his T-shirts.

“What would Jesus bomb?” Har-de-har.

I’m not going to miss “Six Feet Under” quite so much, now that we have “Entourage” and “The Comeback” to look forward to, both of which made me forget all that weeping the hour before. I absolutely didn’t see the backwards-dress thing coming.

Let’s cut this thing short, then, with a snippet of bloggage: The DetNews blogmaster asks contributors to post something every day for a month, so what the hell, I’m keeping my word. A Sunday trifle.

Today at the DetNews politics blog, moi, on Bill Frist’s shamelessness.

Just a note: I’ll be a guest-blogger for the next 30 days at the Detroit News politics blog. My first entry is up, a stirring defense of John Roberts’ right to have a sense of humor.

A few weeks ago I made a personal vow to not spend more than one hour online, excluding the time it takes me to write these few lines every day and handle the e-mail. To some extent I’ve been successful, but I’m appalled at what I find myself coming late to.

For instance, only today did I find the photo of what Page Six is calling Jude Law’s nanny-poking stick. (That link is not safe for work, as the nerds say.) I like “nanny-botherer,” myself, but no one asked me. Anyway, it wasn’t until I spotted a dashed-off Salon essay on the subject that I even knew this vital Internet story was breaking.

And to think we tell these people to “get a life.” When they already have the only kind that matters! The kind lived on the internet, where we can look at long-lens photos of naked movie stars.

(By the way, I may be betraying more than I wish to here, but it didn’t look all that negligible to me. Just average. Also, consider: It’s connected to Jude Law. Please.)

I think what I need to do instead is cull my blogroll, make it tight and light and info-dense and b.s.-lite. But then I’d miss so much. Only today I learned it’s possible, on this very same internet, to buy a black-velvet painting of Zell Miller. Actually, there’s an entire gallery of black-velvet Republicans. Even Dick Cheney.

And this is what you learn when you violate your one-hour rule.

Something I learned the other day was the story about the couple who got their check at a New Jersey restaurant and discovered they’d been ID’d by the bartender as “Jew couple.” Today it was a woman who had trouble with — imagine this — Comcast, and received her bill some days later, only to find she’d been called an amusing, stress-busting-for-the-operators name, too. “Bitch Dog,” in this case.

God knows what they called me last month.

Maybe the coming Battle of Armageddon won’t be between the Forces of Freedom and those of Medieval Islamofascism; maybe it won’t be between Christians and Antichristians. Maybe it’ll be between customer-service operators and the customers they are supposed to serve. And if we have any brains at all, we’ll band together and attack the people who imposed this crap on us in the name of cost-cutting.

Today I got a call from someone who’d been trying to reach me for a while, judging from how often “out of area” turned up on the Caller ID the last few days. It was an automated bill-collecting call, for a person I’d never heard of. Press 1 if you’re this person, I was instructed; 2 if the person is there and can come to the phone; and 3 if you want to hear the options again. No option for “you have the wrong damn number, fool,” so I pressed 1, what the hell. I was transferred to a computer voice that informed me the person I’d never heard of owed $40 and change to the Quality Paperback Book Club and did I intend to pay it? Press 1 if yes. Let’s build false hope; I pressed 1. I was given an address to send my check or money order to. I hung up wondering if I’d just thrown a monkey wrench into the QPB Club or my own personal life, because obviously they didn’t get the message. Communication, they taught us in high school, is a loop. If you don’t hear back, you’re not communicating. If someone owed me $40, I’d want to hear what they had to say about it.

Oh, well. A random Thursday, it was. We seem to be ramping up for yet another hot spell, so I tried to do cool things short of turning on the air conditioner — sitting quietly under the ceiling fan, washing the car, going to the library. Kate and I rode bikes there, then stopped for lunch at the Mack Avenue Diner. She ordered grilled cheese and a milk shake. When the latter arrived, it appeared to be the Super Big Gulp of milk shakes, so I made her share. I’m convinced 40 percent of all the calories you consume as a mother consist of sharing food with your kid, picking at their french fries and raiding their Teddy Grahams when you’re depressed. On the other hand, it frees you to drink milk shakes again, so where’s the harm?

I have a deadline tomorrow, so probably no more posting until…hey, it’ll be Friday by then. No more posting until “Six Feet Under” wraps. I’m sure there’ll be plenty to discuss.

The great thing about any state fair is not the midway, nor the agricultural exhibits, nor the animals, and not even the butter cow and calf. The great thing about the state fair is the meeting of country and city, a few days of courtship when we can all forget what it is we dislike about one another and just have fun. City folk can try their hand at shearing a sheep or milking a cow, and country folk can bet on a trotting race or slip off the fairgrounds entirely and go check out the casinos downtown.

I was raised in a state fair city, Columbus, Ohio, home of perhaps the nation’s greatest state fair. (Yes, this includes you, Texas.) It runs for more than two weeks and I couldn’t imagine missing it when I was growing up there. If I still lived there I’m sure I’d still be attending, complaining along with everyone else about the heat, and the smells, and the ridiculous prices, and the scuzzy guys running the rides. Complaining is part of the fair experience. But actions speak louder than words, and you always come back. Because secretly? You love it.

Michigan’s state fair is held in Detroit, which shocked me. I figured it would be in Lansing or Grand Rapids or another more centrally located city, but when you think about it, it makes sense. Detroit is Michigan’s city-est city, so it should host a tribute to the country. Kate and I and one of her friends attended today.

Not only is the fair in Detroit, the fairgrounds are on the infamous 8 Mile Road (motto: “Seeing that your liquor-store and strip-club needs are met in every block — sometimes twice”). A century ago Joseph L. Hudson sold the land to the state agricultural association for a dollar, and there the fair remains today, just inside the limits of the decaying city with the worst national reputation this side of East St. Louis, and every year farm kids come from all over the mitten to show their goats and pigs and cows and horses. They’re joined by pitchmen selling waterless cookware and aluminum siding, beekeepers displaying a see-through section of the hive, 4-H clubs with their blue-ribbon squash and pumpkins, vendors of fried dough and mystery meat impaled upon a stick — oh, you’ve been to the state fair somewhere. You’ve inhaled the odors of saltwater taffy mixed with manure. You know.

I covered the fair for the Columbus Dispatch in ’84. There was a new exhibit that year — the cow maternity ward. The fair management thought a few people might want to come by and watch a heifer give birth, what the heck. By the third day they were erecting bleachers, so great were the crowds. Apparently the last two decades have been growth years — the Miracle of Life tent at the fair this year is sponsored by Chrysler and Jeep, and has a generous space featuring cows, pigs, goats and sheep. Michigan State vet students staff the pens, holding up the new babies for petting and answering questions about why things are happening the way they are inside the birthing pens.

When we visited, a cow was closing in on delivery. She stood in the corner of the pen with a faraway look of concentration, breathing shallow, a little hump-backed. Her bag of waters had already broken. The vet students said if we cared to wait, we’d see the calf emerge in about an hour. Kate was already totally grossed out and was relieved to vote for coming back when it was all done.

“What’s coming out of the cow’s butt?” she asked.

“That’s not her butt, that’s her vagina,” I said. “Probably just remnants of her amniotic fluid. Birth is messy.”

I could see the wheels turning, the mammal-to-mammal connection being made. She wanted the hell out of there, and I couldn’t blame her. So we hit the midway, where I tried hard not to think about metal fatigue and how the ride operator lost all of his lateral incisors. When we returned, the calf was on the ground being rubbed down by the students while the vet waited on the placenta. I’m sort of glad we missed the middle of that movie, because by now I was getting hungry.

I found a trailer nearby — Trudy’s All-American BBQ. (Thank you, southerners, for inventing the pulled-pork sandwich served Carolina-style, with the slaw on top.) The girls ate their carny food, and we went inside to escape the heat. We ended up at the booth of the people waging war against the emerald ash borer, the reason I hear wood chippers so many mornings lately. We left with green pencils and a handful of emerald ash borer temporary tattoos.

It was freebie city all through the ag exhibits — drinkable yogurt and bottomless cups of chocolate milk from the dairy folks, more temp-toos from the cherry growers and insect-control folks. We filled our bags with them, and paid too much for everything else.

But that’s the fair, isn’t it? By the time we sat, exhausted, in front of a dog agility contest, we felt we’d seen not everything, but enough. We missed the fishing pond shaped like the lower peninsula, but we saw the butter cow. We rode the rides but missed goat showmanship. We saw the rabbits but skimped on the sheep. I knew it was time to go when I found myself seriously considering buying a pair of racing pigeons offered for sale in the poultry building.

We drove home along 8 Mile, and I marveled again at the wonders of capitalism — all the strip clubs have signs advertising their low cover charges, which competition has driven to $3. Juliet fell asleep. Kate clutched the stuffed bear she won throwing darts and sorted her tattoos.

I guess we’ll be back next year.

NOTE: Your comments in the preceding thread touched me, and I thank everyone who rang in. I guess I gotta keep doing this.

Sorry the Poor Man link was wrong yesterday. It’s fixed now. Funny how no one pointed this out until late in the evening. Of the dozen or so out there actually reading this, you’re going to have to get on the ball with calling me on these screw-ups. Lord knows I should do it.

(I have no idea who reads this blog, or where they come from. The Two Guys Living Room Web Hosts either didn’t install site-tracking software or didn’t tell me how to find it. For all I know, it’s you, that other guy and my family. On the other hand, I don’t need another thing to obsess over, so maybe it’s all for the best.)

So, then.

I’ve been meaning to write something about widgets, the li’l applications that could, the best thing about the latest Mac OS. Hit the F12 key, and a self-selected array of widgets bloom on your screen; hit it again, they go away. J.C., NN.C’s web adviser, tells me “they’re basically teeny web pages,” but they’re really the right thing at the right time — all the teeny web pages you need to check every day, but without having to go look them all up.

My widgets (current): sticky notes, local traffic, local weather, local weather radar, calendar, daily reading from the Tao Te Ching, cocktail-recipe database, dictionary/thesaurus, IMdB, and my current fave — a tiny little postage stamp that tracks my Gmail inbox. It’s blue when there’s no new mail, but turns red when I have any waiting.

I change them a lot, though. I keep a blood-alcohol calculator in the wings, a world clock, a metric-conversion table and a flight tracker. When Deb came to visit a few weeks ago, before I set out for the airport to pick her up, I checked the flight tracker to see if she was on time. (She was.)

Kate chose the Gmail tracker, a Frogger game knockoff and a floating Apple logo. Plus weather. She’s obsessed with weather.

Lately I’ve been trying a new one, a gas-price tracker. Today it said the Mobil station at the end of the block had regular for $2.24 a gallon. I went down to fill up. Oops — $2.70 a gallon.

Nobody’s perfect. They’re a cinch to get rid of, I’ll say that.

Bloggage: It’s not just a tough town, it’s a tough state.