Would anyone like to guess how old Anne Bancroft was when “The Graduate” was made? Thirty-six. Guess how old Dustin Hoffman was? Thirty.

The first time Sally Field played opposite Tom Hanks, she played his girlfriend (“Punchline”). Six years later, in “Forrest Gump,” she played his mother.

Life isn’t fair, but Hollywood really isn’t fair.

Of course, Mrs. Robinson was one of the sexiest fortysomething babes to ever be captured on film. Probably because she was only 36.

Want to read a good revisionist take on “The Graduate”? Check out Roger Ebert’s.

Why am I writing short paragraphs, like Lance?

One of those things.

On the organizational continuum of 1 to 10, I’d put myself at about a 5.7 — I make lists, but I don’t usually get through all of them. Today the list was:

Finish painting kitchen.
Clean kitchen from top to bottom.
Go grocery shopping.
Buy a lovely bouquet of flowers for the kitchen bay window, to celebrate the new look.
Make ice cream.
Fix a nice dinner.

What I accomplished on the list: Nothing. But it was still a good day.

I started with good intentions (painting), and took a break to check my e-mail. Good thing I did, and good thing the person I was having lunch with today sent a “see you there” e-mail that I received just in time to take a speed shower, scrub the Lavender Ice from my cuticles and sprint to Ann Arbor to have a two-hour business lunch that I would have otherwise totally forgotten. I would have remembered it, had my calendar not been buried under a pile of crap in the family room, due to the kitchen-painting project.

Ah, so what? Everything gets done eventually.

Tomorrow: Pictures. (I hope.)

Ann Arbor was lovely. No parking, but lovely. That is my town, I must say, the only place I’ve ever lived where I felt more or less at home. I pick up Kate at school this year among a herd of blondes wearing diamond rings of one carat or more. I picked up Kate at school in Ann Arbor among graying late-starters like me, lesbians and even the occasional blonde, who might be picking up her little towheaded clone but also a Chinese, Guatemalan or other differently colored child. Things about Ann Arbor drove me nuts, but mostly I loved it, five-month winter and all.

I don’t think I’d love it so much if Alan were commuting 90 minutes a day, though. Best to leave it a rosy memory I can visit inside of an hour.

Tomorrow’s ice cream flavor: Banana with chocolate chunks. Chunky Monkey, without the walnuts. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

When we were Fellows, the group traveled to Detroit on a field trip, where we sat through the morning meeting at the Free Press. Someone asked an editor how you judge the display of crime news in a metro area so far-flung and sprawling. The answer was a version of “you trust your gut,” but I also recall this response: “Heinousness plays a part.”

Well, I’ll say:

As paramedics frantically stripped 17-year-old Billie Rutledge to find the first series of bullet wounds and try to save his life, the man, now armed with a shotgun, walked up to the driveway on Omira in northern Detroit. He ordered paramedics to step aside.

With that, he leveled the shotgun at Rutledge, as the paramedics fled, and blasted the teen early Saturday morning in the top of the head.

Painting the kitchen was so exquisitely boring today — brush brush brush roll roll roll swear swear swear — that I’m not giving you a single detail. Let’s chat about “Six Feet Under” instead. Tonight’s episode was called, coincidentally, “A Coat of White Primer.” Hah.

I’m optimistic about the last season. I always am. Face it, for all the nitpicking, 6FU, like most HBO dramas, is so much better than everything else on TV that I don’t really care if the stories get far-fetched or the situations circular. What else do I have to do for the next hour? Watch “Law & Order” reruns? “House”? Please. I’m there.

I really enjoyed this week’s opening set piece, which regulars know is always a death. This week’s — a woman in therapy goes around sharing her feelings, and ends up impaled on an andiron — just killed. (Sorry.) I’m a Fisher at heart; a little repression never hurt anyone, and in fact makes the world go round. It makes it run smoothly, anyway. Find me a person who says, “It’s time for me to think about my needs” and I’ll show you a real asshole.

Someone said that to a friend of mine, years ago. She had to bite her tongue not to reply, “That’s all you DO.”

The rest of the episode? Worth the wait. No picking nits for me. I’m just happy it’s back.

Now, back to Lavender Ice. It needs a second coat. But it looks good!

Tomorrow — today, for most of you — I am painting the kitchen. It’s the least I can do, as the burden of most of the wallpaper-stripping and most of the priming and all of the ceiling-painting and all of the new-light-fixture-installation was borne by Alan. So tomorrow, I take brush in hand, open the can of Lavender Ice and try to perform up to Alan’s standards.

No small task. You have never met a pickier home improver.

When Alan started his new job after Christmas, and we were living apart and trying to sell our house, I started watching a trifle on HGTV called “Sell This House.” People with houses that won’t guess-what are visited by a chirpy team of annoying people who do a quick and dirty redecoration and then reposition the dog as…a show dog, anyway.

I thought we would bond over this show, which I enjoy because it features clueless nimrods who have to learn — yes, learn — that when a house is for sale, it’s a good idea to take your bicycle off the front porch and slap a coat of white over your grass-green bathroom that hasn’t been painted in 20 years. I watch it to crow with superiority. Alan? He’s just an insufferable nit-picker.

“You’re painting wallpaper?” he moans. “The new owners will HATE you. Don’t you know prep work is 90 percent of the job?”

Prep work is, indeed, 90 percent of the job. Now that the prep work is over, I’ll handle the remaining fraction.

It’ll be a good day to be inside — we topped 90 degrees today and likely will tomorrow. In case you were wondering, it snowed…five weeks ago? OK, six. Six weeks ago, snow. Today, mid-summer. And you wonder why Midwesterners are so hardy.

In between today’s 90 and tomorrow’s 90, we had a thunderstorm. I watched it march from Lake Michigan to Huron and Erie via radar, an angry line of red. Alan had gone paddling on the lake, and as the wind lashed the trees and the rain started to fall, I’ll admit to a moment or two of worry. But just a moment. Alan takes care of himself so well in the outdoors that I just don’t bother fretting anymore. Watching “Cast Away” with him was an interesting experience; I realized that if I ever find myself in the Helen Hunt role, I’ll never be able to remarry and move on with my life, because if there’s a way to stay alive in the widely scattered, uncharted islands of the south Pacific, he’ll figure it out. It was sort of like watching “Sell This House” — I’m thinking, “Oh, that poor guy, how will he survive?” and Alan’s yelling “Turn the goddamn life raft over, you idiot! It’s raining! Collect some drinking water! And open the package with the angel wings on it! Use the ice skates!”

He would have been home in a month.

But enough about my husband. On to the bloggage:

The NYT was a feast this morning, but I think my favorite was this slight “Modern Love” piece, about a man who fell in love with his girlfriend’s dog…but not his girlfriend. They stayed together a year on the strength of the human-canine bond. Everyone should have a dog.

In spring, a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of the fifth-grade sex movie. I had no idea this was an academic tradition, although come to think of it, it’s actually on the school calendar at Kate’s elementary: Fifth-grade human reproduction curriculum. The NYT does a historical piece.

Found via the Poor Man: Paul Revere a despicable tattletale, says GOP: Republicans today criticized Paul Revere for his famous ride, saying that he had violated professional colonial ethics by divulging military secrets in violation of his duty to his lord, the King of England.

“These were sensitive informations about military troop movements with which he had been entrusted,” said G. Gordon Liddy, an expert on ethics in government and a professor at several unaccredited law schools.

That G. Gordon. Such a patriot.

And I knew there’d be good news for me, if only I waited long enough: Curvy women “will live longer,” say experts. Gotta love passages like this: Institute of Preventative Medicine in Copenhagen researchers found those with wider hips also appeared to be protected against heart conditions.

The researchers say hip fat contains a beneficial natural anti-inflammatory.

That’s a BBC story, so be advised a British 14 is closer to an American 12. Still.

Maybe the magic number is 40. I’m so there.

If I ruled the world, no columnist would be permitted to refer to a sitting, former or aspiring mayor as “hizzoner.” No, not even if you asked really, really nicely. I’d also ban “Politics ain’t beanbag” and “All politics is local.”

Tomorrow: The ruler of the world takes on driving habits.

I’m so glad the economy is doing better. Now that I’m a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal, I don’t know what I’d do without their periodic Dispatches From the America I Don’t Know and Don’t Recognize. Today’s installment — which I can’t link to — details the latest in yachting trends: freighters.

Yes, these “SUVs of the high seas” are being bought by bored rich people, rehabbed to comfortably accommodate themselves and their trophy wives, and then hit the watery road with such new amenities as a topside basketball court. “industry experts say the demand for the mega-boats is growing in part because of their macho ‘Perfect Storm’ appeal — a big selling point for thrill-seekers.”

I wonder what your average New England swordfisherman — who invented “macho ‘Perfect Storm’ appeal” by going out and dying in same — thinks of this. Astonishingly, none were consulted.

Oh my, but it’s an overcast Friday — threatening skies after a week of Southern California-style sunshine. It re-orders the to-do list, which is fine, because “cut grass” has been replaced by “read three more chapters in ‘The Hot Kid.'” It’s a good way to limp into the weekend, and so to the bloggage:

And I don’t have any, or much. Want to be depressed on an overcast day? Check out the NYT’s story on young girls and AIDS in Africa. Man hands on misery to man…

PATRICE LUMUMBA, Mozambique – They met a year ago on the dirt road outside her aunt’s house, in this struggling township where houses are built from bound-together reeds and the only water comes from wells. Flora Muchave was 14. Elario Novunga was 22, nicely dressed and, Flora said, full of promises.

“Now,” Flora recalled her sobbing from her deathbed, “you are going to suffer.”

Jeez, let me just open a vein now.

TPM Cafe is sort of like the Huffington Post, with 99 percent less unembarrassed idiocy. It’s only in its third day, but I have hope.

And I have hope for the weekend. We may go sailing among the midges. I hope you do, too.

A strange phenomenon is going on this morning. We’re having an insect hatch in the neighborhood — Alan, streamside entomologist, informs me they’re midges — and many are clinging to the screens, too lazy to go out and breed, I guess. So enterprising birds are hovering at the windows, plucking them off. Some birds hover better than others, so this is a noisy business as they batter the screens. (Plus the lawn crew just came to my neighbor’s; 10 minutes of airport-level engine noise and they were done. Vanished, along with the grass clippings.)

I don’t know if it’s our proximity to the lake, the heavy tree cover or what, but we generally get a more interesting bug-and-bird show here than in Fort Wayne. The other day I saw a scarlet tanager bopping around the park strip. A first.

But I didn’t start this for the nature update, but to plug in two bloggage bits I forgot, earlier:

I’m glad Lance has the patience for this, because someone has to take apart the Human Events list of the “10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries.” Guess what’s No. 4 on the list. Ready? The Kinsey Report. As if:

The Kinsey Report? “The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy,” the editors explain. In other words, The Kinsey Report invented homosexuality and the homos caused AIDS. Before Alfred Kinsey there were no gay men, only a few scoutmasters, lonely sailors, prep school circle jerkers, and considerate husbands who went cruising because they wouldn’t dream of insulting their wives by asking them for a blow job.

Oh, and Hank explains the special magic that is Hank, via Poynter. Follow the link within to the story they’re talking about.

“I’m Pope Benedict XVI. When I get home from a hard day at the Vatican, I like to pour myself a drink, relax and thank God for Springer on the radio.”

Right-wing maroons sling so much b.s. about their ideological opponents that I don’t even keep track anymore, but one that really rankles is the one that says lefties don’t have a sense of humor. When I heard the bumper quoted above on Air America the other day, I laughed out loud. Maybe you had to be there. But it tickled me.

There’s lots of talk radio to choose from in the D. We have WJR, the Rush/Paul J. Smith/Mitch Albom juggernaut; WDTK, B-team conservative talk (Prager, Ingraham, Medved, Blackjack Bill Bennett, etc.); and Air America, the call letters of which I can’t remember. Plus the usual NPR assortment. And you know what? It all sucks.

I used to punch frantically up and down the dial, looking for a decent song to listen to. Now I punch around for something, anything that doesn’t bore me to death or start me pounding the steering wheel. Last week I switched between a discussion on women in combat on NPR, Dennis Prager sounding like the pompous windbag he is, Al Franken droning droning droning and Rush, aka Insta-Change-the-Station.

I gave up and put on Pere Ubu, “Story of my Life.” Not a bad album.

When the best thing on Air America is Jerry Springer, you know you’ve either found an unpolished gem or the outfit’s in trouble.

To-do list: Buy more Pere Ubu albums. Also, the new Beck.

What a day today — sunny, hot, luverly. I spent a chunk of it inside (working! whee!), then a chunk at the Eastern Market, buying vanilla beans for Project Ice Cream. They smelled so good I felt like sticking one up each nostril and seeing what kind of laughs I got, but no. I just snorfed and sniffed and drove home over surface streets. I was looking for a sign I’d seen painted on a building last week, when I was without a camera: “Dentures of the Future.” Didn’t find it, but as usual, I found a gazillion other amazing sights in that wrecked old mansion of a city. Remind me of this giddiness if I’m ever carjacked.

Speaking of wrecked old mansions and the like, that seems a good time to move to the bloggage, where we commend Ashley for sending us to “The Five-Bedroom, Six-Figure Rootless Life” in today’s NYT. Part of their series on class, which has so far been a big ol’ bore (richer people get better health care? Who knew?), this installment was worth the time. It’s about the Links, young, affluent and on their way to…someplace else. For the time being, they’re in Alpharetta, Ga.:

(They) belong to a growing segment of the upper middle class, executive gypsies. The shock troops of companies that continually expand across the country and abroad, they move every few years, from St. Louis to Seattle to Singapore, one satellite suburb to another, hopscotching across islands far from the working class and the urban poor.

“It’s as if they’re being molded by their companies,” said Tina Davis, a top Alpharetta relo agent for the Coldwell Banker real estate firm. “Most of the people will tell you how long they’ll be here. It’s usually two to four years.”

It’s been interesting to watch the reaction on the Deep Throat story. I never spent the time others did, trying to figure out who he or she might be. Ultimately, what’s the point? The story is the point, not the source. And, having seen the first whiffs of crabbiness last night from Pat Buchanan et al, I can’t say I was surprised to hear some are still carrying a torch for Nixon, but really, Ben Stein’s gone right off his rocker:

So, this is the great boast of the enemies of Richard Nixon, including Mark Felt: they made the conditions necessary for the Cambodian genocide. If there is such a thing as kharma, if there is such a thing as justice in this life of the next, Mark Felt has bought himself the worst future of any man on this earth. And Bob Woodward is right behind him, with Ben Bradlee bringing up the rear. Out of their smug arrogance and contempt, they hatched the worst nightmare imaginable: genocide. I hope they are happy now — because their future looks pretty bleak to me.

Got that? Oppose Richard Nixon, accept responsibility for the Khmer Rouge. No wonder these folks have no problem believing Bill Clinton taught millions of middle-schoolers to give one another oral sex.

Satirizing The Corner’s been done before. But the Poor Man does it again. Such an obvious target, and yet…it still works.

Oh, and what happens if you take a random episode of “Deadwood” and cut out all the clean parts? You’re left with seven minutes of filth! Funny, but, you know, not safe for work or children.

And now I must go — got the new Elmore Leonard from the library today, and oh boy, does that promise a toothsome evening of reading. So see you anon.

I have no idea why the following comment, from Jeff, was rejected by the Movable Type blacklist, but what the hell. If you’re a Watergate hobbyist, let’s use it to kick off a thread on Deep Throat discussion. Add your own, if you’re so inclined:

.. . .and for those who haven’t followed the ongoing inside baseball recriminations of the fellow Nixonians, it was fascinating to listen to G. Gordo shiv his little alternative reality into every interview he did, elliptically enough to keep ducking a libel suit from John Dean. His theory, not voiced for ten years but pushed avidly the last twenty, is that the Watergate burglary was entirely a John Dean initiative, set out to recover info Dean feared the DNC had on his wife’s purported pre-nuptual career as a high-priced call girl. Mo was a wild girl, but most unlikely to have been a lady o’ the eve, and even if ’twere all true, it doesn’t begin to explain all the other nefariousness in the White House at that time.

Ah, but it is all great political Kabuki for us mid-40’s age folk. Closure, not so much.

By the way, I’m pretty sure it was the phrase “call girl” that got the comment smacked down, so if you want to continue the conversation on that topic, come up with a euphemism to fool the blacklist filter — “hotel maid,” say.

Richard Cohen weighs in.

I cut my own grass, or else Alan does. Always have; probably always will, at least until we’re unable, at which point our problems will be more profound than a shaggy lawn.

Truth to tell? I kind of like it. Writers live in their heads way too much, and we’re always looking for stupid physical tasks to reorder things up there in our crowded skulls. As long as it’s not too hot and the lawn’s not too big, it’s a half-hour of back-and-forth mindlessness. I don’t get creative. No diagonal lines for me. Just cut the damn thing and have a beer — this I believe.

I grew up in an affluent neighborhood; our next-door neighbor was a carriage-trade OB-GYN, later replaced by a dermatologist. Across the street was a CEO of a thriving company. There was an OSU professor, a retired businessman, this and that from the middle to upper-middle class. The doctor cut his own grass, and the CEO delegated it to his teenage sons, but the job stayed in the family. Everybody cut their own grass, unless they couldn’t, at which point they hired a teenager to do it.

That was then; this is now. No doctor cuts his own grass anymore, and the CEO’s teenage sons are in tennis camp or SAT-prep classes. Most mornings I ride my bike through the lovely streets of the Pointes’ better neighborhoods, and I dodge pickups towing flat-bed trailers hauling mowers, blowers, trimmers and crews of Latino guys. They arrive, pull their starter cords in unison and, in short order and at very high volume, make the place lovely.

Granted, these folks generally have larger lawns than I do, and probably two high-powered careers, too busy to waste a Saturday morning doing yard work. They’d rather write a check than risk spilling gasoline on the driveway filling the mower’s tank.

After a while, these crews become invisible. They’re as much a part of the landscape as the lawns themselves. Someday I’m going to write a murder mystery where the lawn guys hold the key to the mystery, because they see everything and no one thinks they see anything at all.

I’m still cutting my own grass.

Want a good Google? Try “cuts his own grass.”

Bloggage: One of our best KWF seminars last year was on the brave new world of out-there reproductive technology, which Slate sketches briefly in light of the photo op last week by the First Embryo-cuddler.

I have no thoughts at all on the revelation of Deep Throat, other than it’s amusing to watch Pat Buchanan and Charles Colson get all spluttery ‘n’ stuff.

Move to an affluent neighborhood — one a few cuts above your previous neighborhood, anyway — and garage sales become the focus of keen interest. You may have a functioning brain, but you still have a greedy, greedy id, and the id is not only sorely tempted, it’s stupid: Look, a garage sale at a zillion-dollar house! Surely they’re selling a bunch of old diamonds and fur coats they have heaped up in the closets, and at great savings!

I’ve learned this lesson before, but I offer it to you if you haven’t:

1) Affluent people are at least as likely as poorer ones to have atrocious taste (see: Donald Trump).

2) Affluent people are more likely to be really cheap. (It’s how they got affluent.)

3) Their junk looks like anyone else’s junk.

The tag and estate sales have been the biggest disappointment in terms of bargains, but are almost always interesting for the entree you get to a house in transition — I was in one last week that appeared to have been decorated by a preppie on acid. Everything was pink and green, but bright kelly green and vivid fuschia pink. All top-of-the-line fabrics, but, well, if I’m going to drop $2,000 on a used couch, it ain’t gonna be kelly green moire silk. With a ruffle.

Garage sales have been better, but hit-or-miss. This week the city of GP held its World’s Greatest Garage Sale inside a parking garage downtown, surely a stroke of genius — we went through the thing exactly the way you look for a parking place, spiraling up and then down. The bad news: It didn’t live up to its name — it was more flea market than garage sale, and yes, there’s a difference — but there were a few moments. Like: Earlier this year we came thisclose to buying an oversize Mission-style bookcase at a consignment store in Royal Oak. They were having a “half-off sale” that knocked the price from $1,800 to $900. There were two to choose from in different finishes, they weren’t antique, but one was big enough to fill up a big empty wall in our living room and at least partially solve our book-storage problem. Finally, sometime in March, when John and Sammy were visiting, Alan and Sam drove out there to dicker and, with luck, pull the trigger on one of them, the one with the darker finish. As they arrived, some guy was closing a deal to buy it — for $800. Curses! Alan considered getting the other one, but by then it felt like a non-antique, honey-finished oak consolation prize, so he passed.

Well, there it was at the World’s Greatest Garage sale, at the new, Grosse Pointe price — $1,100. Oh, as if.

But we did get a fashionably rusted Mexican iron windowbox for our kitchen, and on the way back to the car, wandered past a homeowner who was, in garage-sale terms, the holy grail — a guy with too much higher-quality crap on his hands who wanted to get rid of all of it.

Which is how, to take the long way around, I bought a brand-new Krups ice-cream maker for $10. (Gotta love affluent suburbanites; when I asked, “why are you selling it?,” he replied, “We have two.”)

We made French vanilla the first night. Nothing like making your own ice cream to appreciate just how much heavy cream and sugar you’re getting in every spoonful. But oh, how far a spoonful goes. I can’t wait until berry season. I told Kate, “We’re going to experiment with ice cream all summer long.” She said, “Yay!” How often do you get to make a kid say yay at the idea of spending time in the kitchen with her mother? Not often. I’d say the money was well-spent.