But the Comcast tech-support staff may be, when I get finished with them. Yes, folks, we finally got our cable fixed. But in the great tradition of, well, me and Comcast High-Speed Internet, that…isn’t fixed. In fact, it’s totally screwed, and I simply cannot face another call to the tech staff, so I can say YES I reset the modem and YES I checked the connections and YES YES YES I know it isn’t a problem in the rest of the neighborhood and yes i said yes i will yes.

Also, I’ve been traveling.

Regular readers know my two Big Fears (as opposed to the ones everyone has — death of children, etc.). They are? Heights and falling. So where did I go last week with Kate and her friend Sophia? Cedar Point! I conquered my fear on a couple of wussy rides, but my knuckles are still white and I repeated “don’t panic” like a mantra. Needless to say, I didn’t try the Top Thrill Dragster, a ride that threatens my bladder control just looking at it. The night previous to our arrival, the dragster failed to crest the hill — click on the link, you’ll get the idea — and sped back into the station in reverse. As my friend Mike Harden says, only in an amusement park do we pay through the nose for an experience that, were it to happen outside the gates, would be the basis for a sizable lawsuite.

Big frustration of Panerablogging — not once but twice in the last week, people I know personally were featured in the New York Times, and for some reason I can’t summon the pages for either. Sorry, Laura Lippman. Sorry, Zach Klein. I drop your names just the same.

And I’m off to do battle with Comcast. Photos later.

The cable guy was here when I came back from Target (new sneakers for Kate, Oxi-Clean, 10 notebooks for a buck). He was on a ladder at the pole, which looked promising. I came in, and Spriggy was doing the usual jaunty room-to-room trot he does when we have company (company who isn’t eating, that is; for them he sits adoringly at their feet).

“The cable guy likes Spriggy,” Alan said. “He has two Jack Russells.”

When he came back into the house, he told us the story of his pair of terrierists — how the female bosses the male mercilessly, but he defends her like a lion against all intruders. He also has two pit bulls, and the Russells are the bosses of them, too. They like to tease the bigger dogs, taunting them from inches beyond the limit of the chain the pits are kept on.

Then he told us about the time the male Russell was digging a hole in the yard. He moved him to a kennel and covered the hole with an old car wheel. The dog did what any self-respecting Russell would do — tunneled out of the kennel and returned to the hole, where he got his head stuck in the wheel.

“We had to take him to the vet, and there was a crew from ‘Animal Cops’ there. They came out with their minicams, shooting the whole thing, and then they came back a month later to see how he was doing.”

“How did they get his head out?” Alan asked.

“Put him to sleep and greased him up with mineral oil, and it slid right out, because he was relaxed,” he said. “That dog got me seen all over the world.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s a good story. Is the cable working now?”

“No,” he said. “This is a case for the line tech guys. It’ll be a couple more days at least.”

Argh.

The cable guy hasn’t arrived, but I’m getting a little wi-fi leakage from the neighborhood, so let’s carpe the signal, eh? Also, I notice my total number of posts has reached 666. Can’t let that sit for long, lest the Rapture catch me nappin’.

Anyway, I just wanted to take note of something that happened today when I was making my bed. I heard a thump at the window that I’ve come to identify as a misguided bird. When I looked down to see how the thumper was doing, however, I saw a scene that reminded me how nature is red in tooth, claw and beak.

Two birds, a grackle and a robin, had ganged up on a sparrow, which I assume was the bird that hit the window. Both had their wings spread and lowered in threat posture, and were taking turns pecking the crap out of this little sparrow. After a few pokes the robin backed off, but the grackle was merciless. Every time the sparrow would try to rise to an upright position, he’d move in for another smackdown. When it finally was still, the grackle picked the corpse up in its beak and flew away.

My jaw dropped. I thought grackles ate worms and grubs and other junk on the lawn. I had no idea they were predators.

Turns out I don’t know much: In rare instances, Common Grackles will attack and eat small birds and lizards, and in coastal areas they forage at the tide line for small invertebrates, even wading into the water to capture live fish.

So at least it was a rare occurrence. Sort of cool to see, in a bloodthirsty way, of course.

…thunderstorm!

Yes, when it rains, it really does pour. Sunday noonish we were hit by a moderate thunderstorm. An apparent nearby lightning strike sent a power surge through the house, and the cable was the victim. We lost all our premium channels (no HBO! On Sunday?!) and our modem, so.

Welcome to Panerablogging.

Or rather, welcome to not much Panerablogging, because I’ve been offline a while. But:

No one tells a story like Jon Carroll. Here, another fine one, this time about interviewing Groucho Marx.

The cable guy comes tomorrow. Pray for us.

…houseguests! Updates later, although widely scattered, through Monday.

In the meantime:

Lance and Sheryl, sittin’ in a tree, noticing their amazing resemblance to one another. This is Mick and Bianca all over again.

Richard Cohen on suicide bombing.

Enjoy the rest of this broiling-hot week. If you can. I’ll be around, just not reliable.

Last week marked the 10-year anniversary of the Detroit newspaper strike, a fact that went largely unmentioned in both papers (just this one column). I’m not surprised, really; I think it’s something everyone involved would like to forget.

The short version: When the combined unions of the Detroit Free Press and News struck the papers in July 1995, the end result was total disaster and a pyrrhic win for management. Which is to say, the paper continued to publish, a lot of good people lost their jobs, the unions’ backs were broken and the papers lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers. For good.

We were living in Fort Wayne then, but it reached that far. Our paper shared a parent company with the Free Press, and when Freep management decided to put the paper out with replacement workers, they called on their sister papers for help. The executive editor I was hired by routinely refused to pass along these requests from corporate HQ, but the one who came after him had a history of union-busting and was happy to put out the call. As I remember, two people took him up on it,.

Both said they were doing it to “save union jobs,” because if the paper didn’t stay healthy during the strike there wouldn’t be jobs to go back to. One had a girlfriend who worked for the Freep, and his intention was to give his salary to her, to keep the wolf from her door, which seemed at least a somewhat heroic motive.

It was a well-compensated gig. You got your salary from your home paper, plus whatever union scale was for your level of experience at the striking paper, plus room and board. If you wanted to put a quick couple grand in your pocket, it was one way to do it. But the stories coming back from Detroit made it sound like no amount of money would be enough. The pickets were boisterous from the beginning, and as the strike wore on, an air of desperation set in. Plus I think some people were using the opportunity to say things that you could never say in an office; I’m thinking of an exchange I heard about thirdhand — yes, I know what a thirdhand report is worth — of one woman shrieking into the face of a manager coming to work: “I HATE YOU! EVERYBODY HATES YOU! YOUR HUSBAND HATES YOU!”

It would have seemed ridiculous, these white-collar, college-educated people carrying on like this, yuppies who already made pretty good money and didn’t have to worry about losing a finger in a punch press. But this is Detroit; we name freeways after labor leaders here. Many strikers were the sons and daughters of Teamsters and auto workers, people who owed their college educations to the good salaries their parents made as union members. There were signs on lawns all over southeast Michigan: “No scab papers at this address.” These weren’t employees; these were readers. Even if they weren’t screaming in their bosses’ faces, there was a great deal more at stake than just one company and its workforce.

And I think everyone must have known that. One of my writing-group members went through this and submitted his personal recollection for a critique. He was non-union and his wife was a striker, and there were stories of tears and shouting and a birthday cake being thrown into the trash in fury, of riding in the company van to work while police held the pickets back, and stony stares and security guards who stuck video cameras in your face. The van driver casually calls the pickets assholes and the passenger says that’s my wife out there. I can’t imagine.

But the papers continued to roll off the presses, and the company began hiring permanent replacements, and little by little people started coming back to work. A few years ago I took a writing workshop in Detroit, and went out for a drink with one of the Free Press people in the same class. She said she came back when her house was on the verge of foreclosure, and that there were still people who didn’t speak to one another. “There are grades of morality, I guess,” she said. It depended on whether you came back in the first wave or the seventh, if you came back because your kid was sick and you needed your medical benefits, or if you were just tired of sitting at home for a cause you knew was lost.

It sounded awful. I really wish the papers had offered something, on the anniversary, that captured that.

It’s funny: When we arrived in Detroit, and I started doing our budget, I noticed that we are paying a fraction, less than a third, of what we paid for health care in Fort Wayne. I guess that’s the unions’ doing, and I’m grateful for it. And I remember back in Fort Wayne, at one of those annual benefits meetings where we’re told just how much more we’ll be paying next year and how much less we’ll be getting for it, asking if the people at union KR papers would be making the equivalent of a car payment for their portion of their health benefits every month. “I’m not sure what they pay, exactly,” the HR person leading the meeting said. “But yes, you may well be subsidizing them.” Divide and conquer, always the management weapon.

Those two people I mentioned, from Fort Wayne, who crossed the line? I think both were offered permanent jobs. One accepted, the other didn’t. The one who didn’t said the one who did was a fucking scab.

Eric Zorn brings us the bad news: Yet another paper — the Chicago Sun-Times — is dropping “Nancy,” the comic strip.

Sun-Times comics editor Chris Ledbetter told me, “Response (to the removal) has been very small, but a few were passionate.”

Hmf. Well. I used to work with Chris Ledbetter. (And is her title really “comics editor”? It can’t be.) I wonder if she’d be so la-dee-da if there were a strip called “Chris” that was tied to her earliest newspaper-reading experiences, and had been a lifelong blessing and curse.

Everyone knows that if you want readers, you have to put their names in the paper, and my earliest memories of getting ink on my fingers are of opening the Columbus Citizen-Journal and reading the day’s “Nancy” strip. That Nancy was almost aggressively homely, had an even uglier boyfriend and seemed incapable of getting a decent punchline going didn’t grieve me until later. But by then I was hooked.

Finding one’s name in pop culture probably isn’t a big deal with kids today; with so many one-off names, it’s harder to find another person, let alone a famous one, who shares your own. But when I was growing up, it bugged me that I wasn’t named, oh, Sally (of the Mustang), or La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-Linda (“when I go to sleep, I never count sheep, I could all the charms about,” etc.), or Jenny (whom Mitch Ryder begged to take a ride with). There was a Nancy in “Rocky Racoon,” and Frank Sinatra’s Nancy with the laughing face, but Sinatra wasn’t on the pop charts any more.

But I had Nancy on the comics page. Nancy in her strange town, with its lollipop trees and oddly vacant streets. A columnist once called this place Minimalism Lane, and that’s exactly right. Dave Barry called Nancy “a continuing Soviet experiment in the development of a joke,” and that’s right. Nancy was unbearably corny, impossibly stupid. I got fed up one day and expressed by displeasure at the breakfast table. My mother explained that Nancy was a strip for “children just starting to read,” and I should lighten up.

Since then I’ve come to appreciate Nancy. So have lots of other people, and as usual, the Wikipedia roundup is the best place to start. Here’s the story of Nancy’s tragic detour, when another artist drew her in this horrible freehand; her cool Afro, which used to be so precise it could be plotted on a grid, went all over the place and Nancy lovers everywhere cringed. That site also includes Confessions of a Nancy addict, a nice introduction to the cult.

When Alan and I got married, the Features department took us out for drinks and gifts. One was “Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Nancy: The Enduring Wisdom of Ernie Bushmiller.” Chris Ledbetter was at that party! How soon we forget.

This weekend’s cognitive dissonance moment came on Saturday, pedaling uphill in a light drizzle. My eyes lit first on the bumper sticker: A picture of a gas-pump handle and hose, and the proclamation, “Remove Bush’s feeding tube.” An unusual sight in GP, I’ll grant you, but then came the camera-pulls-back moment, in which I saw it was decorating the bumper of…anyone? Anyone?

A Cadillac Escalade. Combined MPG: Around 15.

I was home before it occurred to me the sticker may have been a prank, something young Nicholas’ “problem” friend Eric stuck on his dad’s SUV, in lieu of throwing a bucket of blood on it, because that would be, like, vandalism. The other day I rode the park bus — yes, we have one; another post — and sat in front of a quartet of teenagers, who boarded talking about, I swear, world events. I can’t tell you more, because the bus was noisy, but I distinctly heard “foreign aid,” “Tony Blair” and other phrases that seemed to indicate the kids had actually read a newspaper or newspaper-like product sometime in the recent past.

You don’t want to discourage any young person who’d rather talk about the London bombings than X-box games. When the young person seems to be a charter member of the Limbaugh Youth, though, you can be, er, conflicted:

First kid: It’s the federal spending that’s out of hand. Like, $75 million to promote the blueberry industry in Maine? Come on.

Adult sitting in front of them (thinking): It’s impossible for anyone to be this ignorant.

I considered asking our young deficit hawks when they were enlisting in the War on Terror, but figured, hey, it’s summer. Everybody needs to lighten up.

It finally happened. Saturday, the widely scattered thunderstorms that have been the only weather we’ve had for weeks and weeks finally scattered themselves our way. It rained buckets for about two hours, and I learned two things. One, we really should have cleaned the gutters before this; and two, this area has a combined-sewage overflow problem, at least to judge from the smell and color of the Milk River, which is the tributary to Lake St. Clair where our boat is floating. Things were marginally better by Sunday, when we went out for a very short sail in air so dead we were actually being besieged by flies, but we still came across not one but two floating condoms.

(I’m sure there’s a clever name for those, given that floating tampon applicators are known as “beach whistles.”)

And it did make this vessel’s name seem a bit less preposterous:

Today’s high: Ninety-freakin-five. This isn’t summer, it’s an affliction.

Bloggage: Oh my God, who knew? Ahem: New investigations by the Saudi Arabian government and an Israeli think tank — both of which painstakingly analyzed the backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to fight the United States — have found that the vast majority of these foreign fighters are not former terrorists and became radicalized by the war itself.

Sometimes I wish I lived in Detroit, where the elections are never boring.

Less often, I wish I lived in the Bible Belt, so I could picket idiots like this. (I’d move back out as soon as the demonstration was over, though.)

Even less often, I wish it didn’t have to be hot for so long. Carry on.

How did Dear Abby do it? (Or was it Ann Landers?)

PERSONAL to: Maureen. You were right. The real reason to get an ice-cream maker is to mix up some frozen cocktails. Those Tolstinis were excellent, and tonight’s margaritas were likewise. My only regret is I didn’t pull together a fish-taco meal to go with it, but by the second margarita, who cares? Alan had a rough day at work today, and it felt like a true kindness to greet him at the door with a frosty cocktail in a frosty glass.

Now to work on my body, so the next time, I can be wearing a peignoir.

I’m a little surprised more people didn’t comment on the Schwarzenegger story. Maybe it was just me; I had an e-mail exchange yesterday with one of my freelance clients over why I hadn’t been paid yet, and at one point it occurred to me that the amount in question amounted to an evening-out expense report for four executives, and yet it’s ridiculously important for my fragile finances. And Arnold is getting at least a million a year — from a magazine. To consult. I can’t stand it.

I hasten to add, though, that the money is about the only thing I’m not liking about my new life. I write what I want, which is all I want. I just need to figure out a way to write more. And to rewrite my screenplay, finish the treatment on the second, and squeeze in some short stories and/or a novel. Maybe I need a consulting contract.

And I won’t be doing it while school is out, it’s clear. Even with one relatively unscheduled child, it’s amazing how quickly the days pass, and how unproductive they can be, due to the constant interruptions. I’m experimenting with the Digital Underground philosophy of child-rearing, i.e., “Doowutchyalike.” The problem is, whenever I say this, which I put in non-hip-hop language thusly, “Please don’t come to me for every little problem you have. If you want a popsicle, get a popsicle. If you’re having trouble with your friends, work it out between you. If you’re thirsty, pour yourself some lemonade. Just use common sense” — well, it backfires. I come downstairs to find three girls watching Nickelodeon On Demand and jumping on the couch.

“The key phrase here is: Use common sense.”

Bloggage:

Actually, you might want to turn away now, and you certainly won’t want to click this (image-free) link in the presence of bosses or small children, but when I read a story that begins, “Is there any way of making my anus more pink or lighter in color? Mine is dark and I hate it. Any suggestions?” — well, I’m going to read the rest of it. It’s an interesting look at just where on the long continuum of body modification everything tips into lunacy.

And even though there’s just, you know, the one piece, I think that’s enough for you folks. Is it the weekend already? It is. Have a good one.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has, I’d estimate, about 30 percent more IQ points than Jesse Ventura. So when Jesse became governor of Minnesota, and took it as an opportunity to build his brand, as the MBAs say, he did it the dumb way — he accepted gigs in his old venue, professional wrestling, and did color commentary for the preposterous XFL. Hey, lots of people have second jobs, right?

But Arnold, governor of California, is smart, and so he did it in a way that wouldn’t require him to put on a stupid costume or work weekends — he signed an $8 million consulting contract with Weider Publications.

Weider Publications? you’re thinking. Aren’t they the people who publish, like Muscle & Sinew, or those other gay wish books?

Why yes. And what’s the meat of the “consultation?” Try this on for size:

The contract pays Schwarzenegger 1% of the magazines’ advertising revenue, much of which comes from makers of nutritional supplements. Last year, the governor vetoed legislation that would have imposed government regulations on the supplement industry.

Tiresome quote from good-government sort: Larry Noble, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C., said: “This is one of the most egregious apparent conflicts of interest that I have seen. This calls into question his judgment as to who he is working for, and it calls into question what he thinks he owes the public.”

Silly man! Everybody knows that governors work to build their brand. He need to get with the program.

Of course, Ventura was just affluent, while Team Schwarzenegger is rich rich rich already — I’d imagine $8 million would cover two years’ detailing on the Hummer fleet. Silly people! It’s not about the money. As the great exchange in “Chinatown” tells us, it’s about much more than that:

“How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?”

“The future, Mr. Gittes! The future!”