The All-Star Game came off without a hitch last night, so everyone in the city is relieved — no mayhem, riots or embarrassing sprays of gunfire. Alan and I were downtown the Friday previous, having dinner at Vicente’s, the new Cuban place on Library Street (try the midnight sandwich, mmm), and he remarked that things were certainly looking better outside than when he arrived in December. He recalled driving around to three different pay phones one night, trying to call us back in the Fort, and when he finally found one that worked, he had to stand in three inches of slush to make the call.

It was a short one. I never keep people on the phone long.

Things were looking good. My friend Ron remarked at seeing a city employee driving some sort of apparatus down the sidewalk, something like a riding lawn mower with a suction device attached. She was carefully hoovering up litter. “Where have these things been for the last 10 years?” he wondered. “How long did it take to find the key to the warehouse?”

Ten years, I’d say. Let’s hope it holds for a while. Super Bowl’ll be here in less than six months. And that’ll be in three-inches-of-slush season.

Slow, busy day, so not much bloggage today. But! I have this — blogcritics’ list of the 10 most overrated singles of…whenever. You-all can go to town with this for 30 comments, if you ask me. I’ll start with this:

What? And they forgot “Thriller”?

There are a million stories in the Naked City, particularly during the All-Star Game festivities. This is one of them:

One of Alan’s colleagues, a working man of no great pull or clout, bought a password on eBay that promised to let him hack into the All-Star Game ticket database. As promised, the password unlocked the gates of heaven, and he was able to buy four seats for both the big game and the Home Run Derby at face value — considerable, but still face value. He was so nervous/incredulous that this caper apparently worked that he immediately ran down to the ticket office to pick them up.

“Wow!” the seller exclaimed. “These are great seats!”

They were great seats. He was in Jack Nicholson Country, only a popcorn throw away from…how about Bud Selig? Yes, the commissioner of baseball. Anyone else? Yes. George Will, self-appointed poet laureate of this game we call baseball. Hmm, impressive. Anyone else? Jon Lovitz, and “some Red Wings guy whose name I forget,” Alan said. “He said it was ‘the single most incredible sports experience of my life.” Well, I hope so.

Hey, at least he PAID for them. You think George Will didn’t get comped? Grow up.

Oh, and how much did he pay for the password? Four dollars. There are still nickel bargains left in these United States.

I didn’t go to any All-Star festivities this weekend. I went to the pool with Kate on Monday and… I cannot tell a lie. I ogled the lifeguards. To make it seem more like intellectual wool-gathering and less like, well, ogling, I considered how lifeguards can wear so little clothing and still wear it well. The look this summer is to take the standard-issue shorts, which would normally sit at one’s natural waist, and roll them down. Some very brave (and very slim) girls roll them down so far that the legholes of their suits rise above, and that is, well, a very bold look. The guys roll them down until you can see that oh-so-clever V where there hottus abdominus muscles point down to where the action is, and, and…

I’m no tadpoler! I’m just enjoying summer, that’s all.

I mention all this because I had one of those hop-click-jump experiences today, and wound up on one of those religious sites, this one by a woman who advocates “modesty” in apparel. A quick surf through and a recollection of Psych 101 suggests her real motive — insecurity over her fading beauty plus hostility toward the younger and prettier and blah blah blah and before long you’ve come up with an elaborate belief system that says women are happier when they’re covered neck to ankles in clothing that values their true worth as women and so on and so forth.

Yes, it made me think of burkas and chadors. I mean: Duh.

But it led me to a webpage offering “modest clothing resources” and who knew? There are any number of ghastly outfits to be had out there. My favorite? the swimsuits. No, these swimsuits. No, these.

Oh, I give up. I just know I’m tickled when I read sales copy that starts with: Around 1901, swim wear was modest and stylish. ..

Show me a woman who complains she can’t find modest clothing and I’ll show you a) a whiner; and b) the last woman in America who doesn’t get the Land’s End catalog.

Go All-Stars.

Fort Wayne magazine sent me an issue for the second straight month. I’m mystified, as I’m not a subscriber. Last month’s was apparently a gift from Northeast Indiana Public Radio, but I dunno about the one that arrived today. Maybe Alan and I are getting the And Stay Out former employee kick-in-the-pants package; the magazine is published by the newspaper company.

It arrived in time for lunchtime reading. Cover line: “Is downtown Fort Wayne on the verge of being hip?” I turned inside, to see if the question was answered in the world’s shortest magazine article (“No.”). No. Flipped to the society pages. Oh look, there’s a local mover/shaker, and yes, his name is misspelled. He only ran the city’s largest hospital and had his name in the paper regularly for a matter of years; I guess it’s an understandable mistake to call him Rittenheim instead of Ridderheim. I took another look at the cover. The woman closest to the foreground in a seemingly candid photo of one of those verge-of-hip downtown restaurants is one of the contributing writers, which I assume was not coincidental.

Note to readers: If you have to pre-select well-dressed, demographically correct young people for a posed photo of a downtown hot spot, I’d say hipness is not only not on the verge, it can’t even be seen coming down the road. Better luck next month.

Oh, but I guess I can afford to sneer, watching the Home Run Derby take place in my very own town (yes, watching on TV — the air conditioning’s better here). When the camera pulls back to show the stands, you can see the skyline. Alan’s down at the park fiddling with his boat, making sure the running lights work. (“Why does Daddy spend so much time with his boat?” Kate asks. “You know what it’s like when you have a new toy?” “Is the boat a toy?” “A-yup.”)

Not much bloggage today, but I do have this, Slate’s explanation of why Labradors are America’s favorite canine breed. I love Labs, but I don’t have the energy to run them 60 miles a day, or however far they have to travel to take the edge off. Neither, it’s clear to me, do many of the people who own them. They’re still good dogs. Enjoy, Mindy.

Also, it looks like my ol’ pal Leo has started a company-sponsored blog. He links to me; we’ll see how long that lasts (snort). Best of luck, Lenny.

Google Maps, what a marvel. If only it could learn to plot GPS points, and I could reveal our true route on Saturday in the boat, which went from point green to point red and back. Only we were out in the blue part and didn’t follow so straight a path — sailboats rarely do.

And oh what a weekend it was to be a Detroit boater, it being All-Star weekend and all. The Ameriquest blimp — which still doesn’t have the ring of “the Goodyear blimp” — floated overhead, the RenCen loomed downriver, the birdies chirped and the sun poured down like honey and really seemed to be apologizing for winter. At our turnaround point you could practically spit to Canada. We considered asking for political asylum, or maybe just picking up a few bottles of that miracle sunscreen you can’t buy stateside. We settled for a cautionary tale, told by Alan, of a colleague who was out in his own boat one day on the other side of the border and felt nature’s call. He pulled up to a tiny island, and wandered into the woods. When he came out, he was greeted by a Canadian coast guard officer who gave him a ticket for …illegal entry, I guess.

We use the bucket method aboard our boat. Less likely to cause an international incident. Although I must say, if I had an outboard, so to speak, I’d just go off the leeward rail.

Which reminds me that most of my favorite stupid names for mens/ladies rooms come from the world of boating: Gulls/Buoys, Inboards/Outboards, etc.

Boat people can be fairly silly, when you think about it.

Bloggage: I encourage you to follow that sunscreen link, as it revealed a world I didn’t know existed. A verboten sunblock, brought back over international borders? Do they toss your car to see if you’re packing? And the Freep wins the unintentional hilarity award for, in its helpful sidebar, informing readers of the Detroit-Windsor tunnel toll in planning their shopping budget.

And speaking of All-Star weekend, the NYT looks up the sad remains of Tiger Stadium and notes the obvious: With the All-Star Game — and tomorrow’s home run derby — taking place less than two miles away, Tiger Stadium is closed to the public, just another abandoned building in a city full of them. It’s the “just another abandoned building” that really stings, as that could be the Detroit city crest — a shield showing an abandoned building in the upper-right quadrant. Ouch.

Gene Weingarten sums up the dilemma of the homeowner in a hot real-estate market, who could sell for a huge profit, but would have to spend it all and then some on the next house: Our home has become an item of substantial worth but no practical value. We are like idiot thieves who have stolen the “Mona Lisa” but cannot sell it without getting arrested.

Monday! The week awaits! News as it happens!

…that the Transamerica building — you know, the pyramid in San Francisco — is a registered trademark? And to put it in a movie, you have to get permission? Jon Carroll explains the strange and creativity-smothering world of rights and permissions. Bottom line: “Fair use” seems to be a myth.

A couple weeks ago the New York Times called and offered me, their loyal Sunday customer, two months of daily delivery free. I said sure. These days there are two papers on my doorstep in the morning — the Wall Street Journal and Judith Miller’s anguished employer. We are such a sophisticated, well-informed household.

Today’s NYT Page One was on London getting the 2012 Olympics, the Miller story, some other stuff. It doesn’t happen very often, but it happened today: I thought, oh, to be an afternoon newspaper when news is breaking in Europe.

But that’s yesterday’s thinking. The news Thursday was transmitted by bloggers, by cameraphones, by Flickr. (And yes, by the BBC, in its usual excellent form, but I’m talking what’s new here.) I don’t think so-called “citizens media” is the be-all and end-all — note how many of those Flickr images are screen captures of, oh, TV — but I certainly think it’s interesting.

I don’t know if this was the first breaking-world-news since NPR canned Bob Edwards, but it was the first time I noticed them going into CNN mode, with no regard for whatever the regular programming was — WDET stayed with the news most of the day. And there was a bobble or two, but it certainly beat 9/11, when I was driving to work after the second plane hit and my local NPR station was doing its fund-drive chatter. Or maybe it was a Frank DeFord commentary. Can’t recall.

Still on deadline, but relief is in sight. More tomorrow.

Sorry for today’s day late/dollar short entry. I had one of those days yesterday, during which I mostly wandered from room to room, starting projects and not finishing them. It was good news-bad news all day. Good news: The bathing suit bottom and top that I ordered from two different catalogs arrived, and match perfectly. Bad news: In trying to remove them from the packaging, I snipped a small hole in the bottoms. Good news: They’ll take them back. Bad news: They’re out of that color. Good news: The hole is small; I can easily repair it on the machine. Bad news: I can’t find my white thread. And so on, all day.

So the hell with that. I’m starting to sound like Lileks.

Besides, London’s in trouble and I have a deadline. We’ll try for something later. Until then, discuss terror if you’re so inclined. I’ll be watching CNN.

Today was overcast and rainy, a rare break from the sun this summer. It’s been hot and it’s been hotter and occasionally it’s been cooler, but mostly it’s been sunny. So I’ve been thinking more about the sun than I usually do in the summer.

Every day I marinate Kate in SPF 30, and she dutifully dabs it on her face. I do likewise. By the second day of this, she had turned her customary summer shade of Brown Bunny (love that cottontail!), and I’m only a few degrees behind. Today one of those freebie stay-healthy magazines arrived from our HMO, and I felt guilty. There were the usual warnings about sun exposure and wrinkles and cancer and the exhortation to go get a spray-on tan instead, and all the rest of it. I considered trading up to SPF 45, but honestly, my heart’s not in it. Brown Bunny looks good on my brown-eyed, brunette daughter. Her nose is dusted with freckles, her hair is acquiring a highlight job you couldn’t buy for any sum in a salon, and she looks…irresistible. How can something that makes her so beautiful be so wrong?

Well, the article will spell it out for you. I’ll keep coating her with sunblock, but it’s not exactly the equivalent of avoiding cigarettes. As for me, I think: What exactly am I preserving here? My skin was never that great to begin with. Might as well get as wizened as SPF 30 will allow.

Bloggage: Jon Carroll discusses his fear of flying in his usual just-right way, but includes details from the pre-9/11 skies that seem so long ago, it might as well have been the Middle Ages. In fact, I think it really was: Sometimes, on cross-country flights, I would repair to the bathroom for a little medicinal marijuana. I was nervous about getting caught, but it never happened. Maybe smoke detectors hadn’t been installed yet. Once, I came out of the bathroom just as a flight attendant was walking by. She looked at me; I looked at her.

“If you point the air blower at the sink and pull up the stopper,” she said, “you get a nice cross draft. There’s no odor to bother the next person.” I thanked her. Flying wasn’t just relaxed; it was enabling.

I remember when I used to ask for the smoking section. You met more interesting people there, I thought. Never mind the marijuana.

(I once knew a nurse who worked in a cancer ward, and had approximately the same attitude toward self-medicating patients — after visiting hours, anything went. “They have cancer,” she’d say. “And I’m going to tell them they can’t get high? Sorry, no.”)

Richard Cohen touches one of my deepest fears today — the way nothing dies on Google, and dammit, sometimes we wish it would.

I don’t know why this woman has a job. Every line of this lazy, wrong-headed, oversimplified piece o’ crap column is so wrong that if I were so inclined, I could take it apart piece by piece, the way you disassemble a chicken. But it’s late and I’m tired and I’m especially tired of her, so why bother? You can do it yourself.

You could sell snake oil, or you could sell celestial drops. Katherine Harris — yes, that one — is buying. Or was. You have to read it to believe.

Tomorrow’s forecast: Sunny. Time to break out the Coppertone. Again.

Walking the dog this morning I heard a commotion overhead of the jet-engine variety. Glancing up, I was fortunate to catch a long glimpse of one of these bad boys, which was either a B-2 bomber or the Batplane. As an American taxpayer, I felt deeply grateful to see my investment in action (flying, not bombing); the B-2 is lethal but lovely, and I have a soft spot for lovely. Sometimes I think the most pleasing sights in the world are man-made creations doing the things man made them for. This includes domestic animals, selective breeding being one of our great strategies to master the planet. If you’ve ever seen a herd of well-bred Angus cattle or a bird dog working a field, you know what I’m talking about.

As for the B-2 bomber overhead, well, it was the Fourth of July, so the chances of it hurrying to an al-Qaeda assault on Grosse Pointe were remote. I’m sure it was doing parade flyovers, a thought both comforting and irritating. You don’t breed a bird dog to decorate your hearth, and you don’t build a gazillion-dollar airplane to drop jaws at parades. On the other hand, the B-2 is not much use in Fallujah, either.

Sigh. Running the Pentagon must be hard. All those blank checks, and the stores never have what you need.

The long weekend did me some good. Kate and I got out and about on Saturday, while Alan tuned his mast and shivered his timbers and whatever else he had to do. We went to Eastern Market, then into downtown for some exploring. We ended up at Campus Martius park, having lunch in the Hard Rock Cafe, under Marvin Gaye’s shirt. Kate remains utterly unimpressed by popular music — by most music, for that matter. The HRC plays videos nonstop, giving you something to watch if you don’t feel like watching your kid peruse the Little Rockers menu. They played Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself,” which, you’ll recall, features Mr. I being pursued by zombie-like creatures. “Who are those people?” Kate asked. “Why are they chasing him?”

I thought of explaining the early days of rock videos, when the visuals frequently had nothing to do with anything in the song, but seemed to feature whatever loose props and other crap were lying around the studio where they were shot. I didn’t, though. I said, “I dunno.” Which was the truth. That’s why Pop-Up Video was such a hit. It gave you something to pay attention to.

So we finally shook down the Mary M. A few days ago I said that half of my marriage has been spent squabbling over stupid things. “Why are they still together?” you may be thinking. I’ll tell you why: Because the other half has been spent doing battle, as a couple, locked arm-in-arm, one fight one purpose one soul, I tell you, with…outboard motors. If I had $5 — hell, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen my husband jerk at a starter cord, I’d be retired to Barbados by now, where I would have inboard diesels maintained by white-shirted mechanics who would polish them daily.

Which is to say, our maiden voyage was delayed an hour, when we got within sight of the open lake and realized the motor wasn’t going to get us safely out there. And certainly wouldn’t get us back. It would run 45 seconds and die. Then one minute and die. Then 30 seconds and die. And then it quit altogether.

This is frustration: You can see the lake. You know you don’t need a motor to get around on it. And yet, if you want to get back to your slip, if you want to clear the incredibly narrow channel and get out into the water where it’s safe to sail, you need the stupid 8-horse outboard to just do its little bit of work, which is not asking for very much. But which, in this case, was too much to ask.

The good news: It was a $5 part, fixed in two minutes. Eventually, we got out there, and it sailed beautifully. It was my first experience handling a boat with a full keel, and it has a certain gravitas, like driving an Electra 225 over a bumpy road. It rocks, but it doesn’t roll. If that makes any sense.

The bad news: We went to the park today, a perfect day for sailing, with storms coming from far away and a hot wind blowing out of the south at a nice clip, and the motor was up to its old tricks. It’s now in Alan’s trunk, bound for the shop at 9 a.m. tomorrow.

Ah, but we’ll always have our memories:

In this jobless existence I’ve been leading of late, holidays have a way of sneaking up on you. And whaddaya know, Independence Day is upon us. After smashing my head so hard against the wall that I’ve had to scrub ’em down, I’m opting to take a long weekend in lieu of any more. I’m trying to reorder my days to make them more productive and creative and, sure, remunerative, which means I have to set some things aside and/or let them find a new place in the hierarchy. (Pulls at chin — wha-?) OK, I’m trying to write some fiction every day and look for freelance work every day and while blogging still has a place, it’s going to have a somewhat smaller place than what it’s had in the past.

Or else it just can’t take so damn long and suck up so much time. And make me write redundant sentences like the previous one.

Seems a long weekend is a good time to start organizing. Also, to sail the boat.

In the meantime, Richard Cohen on the Speech. Be a patriot this weekend; have another hot dog. I’ll be back on Tuesday.