So now Pretoria is changing its name. The seat of South African government will hereafter be known as Tshwane. So as soon as I read this, my brain started singing “Marching to Pretoria,” which we sang in grade school. An all-white school, of course, but I don’t think that had anything to do with it. It just had a catchy melody.

Whew. Can you tell my brain’s already gone on Memorial Day weekend vacation? If not, that oughta give you a clue.

But hey, I never promised you anything but a stream-of-consciousness rose garden here. Sometimes the roses are droopy.

Fortunately, Jon Carroll is a professional, and works all the way through Friday. Today, he addresses the Wendy’s chili finger:

According to police reports, a guy named Brian Rossiter lost his finger when the lift on a truck severed it. He kept the finger, perhaps in the hope that it could be reattached, perhaps merely as a souvenir. I wonder how many freezers in this great nation contain body parts retained for merely sentimental reasons.

Rossiter: “You’ll think of something.”

And you’ll have a good weekend, I hope. Me, I’ll see you Tuesday-ish.

Did you know Sen. Evan Bayh has a Flickr account? Only, huh, most of the pictures are of him. On the other hand, if you ever wanted to know what Ken and Barbie would look like at midlife, that’s the place to go.

(Which, by the way, should not be construed as a dig at Ken and Barbie. I’ve never talked to Ken, but Barbie herself — Susan — is an effortlessly charming woman. I’m just sayin’: Some things are obvious.)

It’s funny how even journalists bury the lead sometimes. A colleague sent me an e-mail about this and that in Columbus, then oh yeah, I forget if I told you this or not, but a former department head from the paper in my era gave a cocktail party last night to answer any and all questions about … his sex change.

It’s not an all-the-way deal. At his age — 73! — he won’t have the surgery, but will take hormones, a female name and live out his remaining years as a woman. Named Diana.

I can’t tell you how rocked back on my heels I was by this news. I mean: No. Clue.

But as the shock wore off, I started thinking, once again, about the unfathomable mysteries of the human heart. Just a few days ago I was following yet another blog discussion — probably over at Amy’s — about the dangers of turning health ed over to the homos, who won’t stop at sex between men and women or even men and men, but want to open your child’s eyes to transexuality and bisexuality and bestiality and S&M and B&D and probably man-on-dog, except maybe that would be covered in the bestiality chapter.

Obviously, I’m not ready to have middle-schoolers snickering over drag queens. But I also wonder what it must have been like to spend your whole adult life feeling like you got the wrong set of genitals, and finally, at an age when most people have hung up the spikes once and for all, decide what the hell, life is short. I wonder if it would have been any easier if the idea of transexuality had been on the menu 50 years ago. High-school students are certainly old enough to hold such a concept in their minds. Shouldn’t we teach them about it?

Because while it’s true that most of us would be happy to order the cheeseburger or the chicken-noodle casserole every day for the rest of our lives, there is a small but significant number who want the pickled monkey brains, and they ought to know they’re available.

Which is a lousy metaphor, but you know what I mean.

Then I consider how far we’ve come. I’m sure my parents had gay friends, but not like I have gay friends. I doubt they knew any transexuals. I’m no longer surprised to hear that someone is coming out at 40 or 50, or that someone who I’d previously thought was gay has fallen for a member of the opposite sex. It happens. People are complicated and life is a river, and you never know what’s around the next bend. Maybe gender isn’t entirely a social construct, but maybe enough is to make it just a tiny bit unpredictable. I think we mistranslated Genesis. I think the order was not “be fruitful and multiply” (which is sort of redundant), but “be fruitful and really, really interesting.”

So Diana, wherever you are, good luck. You’re very brave. But as one of your golf partners says, if you think this means you can play from the ladies’ tees, you’re crazy.

What a night. Ken Jennings lost and so did the man who rocked that look like no one since Mark Farner. I think I’ll go to bed.

Phil Spector and…

Struwwelpeter?

The above is presented for an audience of one; she knows who she is.

OK, it’s my sister, and maybe by now, others can get the joke. Our parents — our mother, actually — used to terrorize us with occasional readings of “Struwwelpeter,” an old German children’s book that, to borrow a punchline from Jim Harrison, explains a lot about why we’ve had so much trouble from those people in the 20th century. I believe I’ve written about it before, but not since “Shockheaded Peter,” the musical based on it (which closes this weekend, coincidentally). It’s a creepy collection of rhymes about misbehaving children, and the horrible fates that befall them. Really. Suck your thumb, and a giant bearing a huge pair of scissors will run into your room and CUT THEM OFF. (I guess this story laid the groundwork for the masturbation talk that came later.)

Anyway, Phil Spector must have seen the show recently.

Not much today, but a bit of bloggage. I’ve taken to keeping my to-do list on a sticky widget — which is not a sticky wicket, but a computerized sticky note. Tiger has this very cool widget display, which I’ve become rather reliant on. My widgets: Dictionary, traffic, calendar, weather, sticky note and the Daily Tao. (And yes, James, sometimes your haiku, but not always.) I love that one, the Daily Tao, because they use the Stephen Mitchell translation, and what do you know, today is one of my favorites. I used to meditate on it when I was riding horses every day, because it’s pretty much the core of horsemanship:

Men are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born tender and pliant;
dead, they are stiff and dry.

The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.

Anyway, my sticky is full-up today, and yesterday was boring, although I read several chapters of “The Darling,” and once again, Russell Banks has run the bases. I love Russell Banks. You just can’t go wrong with that guy.

So, bloggage:

I don’t know how many readers I still have in Fort Wayne, but those who are left might enjoy a new blog there, Fort Wayne Media Notes. I’ve been saying for years that the town needs some competent media criticism, something it’s been lacking under Miss Reynolds’ reign of junior-high-school mean-girl terror. The proprietor seems to be a nice guy with a better-than-average layman’s take on local media, so I’ll wish him well and hope I don’t regret it later. If nothing else, he must be on the right track, because Miss Reynolds immediately went out and snatched up a bunch of nearly identical Blogger domains, I’m sure to capitalize on people who might go looking and not get the address exactly right. So, then, it’s Fort Wayne Media Notes, not notebook, not news, the latter of which are all the new property of the mean girls.

Lance is trying to drag me down Memory Lane again. He has a post about Colm Feore that mentions yours truly, and includes pictures. That was a good trip.

Department of Gee, Thanks, Eric: Zorn has another link to a time-waster, this one at least marginally amusing: What level of Dante’s Inferno are you bound for?

Me? Oh, you knew I was headed there:

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Take the Dante’s Inferno Hell Test

Note that I ranked high on gluttony and lust. Sounds like a disciple of life to me.

Lance recently confessed that he doesn’t watch TV news. I don’t either — for the most part. But occasionally it sneaks up on you. Last night while waiting up for Alan I caught the 11 p.m. newscast on WXYZ, aka the station that employs Fat Ass. The investigative report was about Roy. Roy is — was — a “teacup chihuahua,” which I assume is like a regular chihuahua, only smaller.

(I love writing “chihuahua.” It’s one of those words like “hors d’oeuvre,” where just learning the correct spelling feels like an accomplishment worthy of your resume.)

Anyway, the story was about the dangers of putting your teacup chihuahua in daycare with the wrong sort of companions. I’m not kidding. Evidently Roy’s owner had him in daycare; why, we weren’t told. Perhaps he was nervous, like all chihuahuas. Imagine living in a world of giants, and you’d be nervous too. But at some point Roy was placed in a cage with “a larger dog,” which wasn’t a helpful description, since virtually every dog in creation is larger than a teacup chihuahua. And the larger dog — “a terrier” is the only description we got — killed Roy.

“Of course he did,” Lance said when I told him the sad story today. “He thought Roy was a rat.”

I’m sure he did. Terriers are famously tenacious ratters. They clamp onto the back of the neck, give a few brisk shakes, and goodbye rat. Sometimes they trot around in a proud circle, shaking the dead rat. Sometimes they drop it and move on to the next one. These details we weren’t given. All we heard was how sad Roy’s owner was, and how sorry she was that she put him in dog daycare with people so thoughtless as to kennel him with a dog who thought he was a rodent.

Roy’s owner only had one photo of Roy, or at least the news crew only got one. We came back to the picture of Roy, goggle-eyed and winsome, again and again. “I miss him,” the owner said, tearing up. “I really do.”

I’m sure she does. The question is, however: Is this report worthy of a top-10 TV news market?

Silly question. Of course it is. That’s been the biggest shock, skipping the 90 or so places between Fort Wayne and Detroit. While FW TV news pitched its product to the mouth-breathing demographic, they didn’t dive quite so enthusiastically for the bottom of the barrel as they do here. I’m sure coming up with a news mix for such a sprawling community is quite the challenge. Do you pitch to the people who keep their TVs on all day long and choose their news based on which has the better lead-in? Or do you go for the wealthier suburbanites, who have the money but, frankly, no interest in what’s happening in, oh, Warren?

Also a silly question. You go with the best video. And in Detroit, there’s never a shortage. Last week, the mayor announced his campaign for re-election, in the wake of yet another story about his fiscal irresponsibility. His father got up and compared his son’s critics to Nazis. His mother got up and had a teeny freak-out; I thought we’d need smelling salts. The mayor himself cried. “I ain’t cried since I was 10 years old,” he said.

I should watch the news more often. Where else can you get entertainment like this at these prices?

POSTSCRIPT: When Alan was a feature writer, he wrote a story about God’s Tiny Kennel, a house we passed in Hicksville (yes, really), Ohio en route to Defiance. There was a sign out front that read “God’s Tiny Kennel — Chihuahua Stud Service.” It turned out the lady was a devout Christian who prayed over every litter before she let them go.

“Would Spriggy kill Roy if they were kenneled together?” I wondered tonight.

“No, he’d just make him his bitch,” Alan replied.

Kate and I and a few zillion other motorists hit I-94 this weekend, and I-94 is hitting back. If we’re going to spend any time at our lake cottage this summer — and I foresee a drastically reduced visitation schedule, for reasons I’ll get to in a minute — we’re going to have to develop some alternate routes. Construction and various improvements have this vital thoroughfare a snarly mess, and a mess it will remain for months, I fear. There’s a stretch west of Ann Arbor where the eastbound lanes have been taken down to bare dirt; they’re rebuilding the road from the ground up, it seems, which does not portend smooth sailing by the Fourth of July.

Anyway, the road is still carrying plenty of traffic, some of it of the winged and insectile variety. The carrion-eaters must have ordered venison this spring, because it seemed there was a dead deer every three miles between the Detroit Metro airport and I-69, where the carnage continues. If there’s a dead-animal pickup crew, they’re either running behind or have thrown up their hands. Since I’ve watched a little “CSI,” I found myself less grossed out than curious at the full range of decomposition on display. One unfortunate doe looked untouched, but appeared to have been snacked upon, anus-first. Ewww. (“That’s where the tender meat is!” chirps Mr. Crow. Ewww.)

Why were we on I-94? Opening the cottage, sweeping away cobwebs, scrubbing the winter off the place. Why just me and Kate? Because Alan was on a road trip of his own. Where to? Southern Indiana. Why? To look at a sailboat.

Yes, a hole in the water you throw money into! He’s not coming home with this one — he and the seller are still $1,200 apart — but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we dock something at our city marina on Lake St. Clair and start spending our weekends tearing up $100 bills in a cold shower, so to speak.

The boat is like this. We’ll see if he gets that one, or something like it.

Much good bloggage this weekend. Too much. I’ll leave you with but one, a delightful NYT piece about the still-standing drag-ball underground. (If you saw “Paris is Burning,” you know. I dragged Alan to that movie early in our courtship. He dug it, proof that marrying him was the right choice.)

Oh, and Lance has a useful explanation of a sometimes-confusing point of theology, vis-a-vis that Santorum profile in the NYT yesterday.

I was making my way down the ever-fascinating 8 Mile Road yesterday, sort of half-listening to “Fresh Air,” when I snapped to attention: Some critic, reviewing some Billie Holiday collection, pronounced “Lady Sings the Blues,” the 1972 movie about her, ahem, “howlingly bad.”

My lower lip pooched out. I kind of liked “Lady Sings the Blues.”

Of course, it came out when I was 14 years old. Fourteen-year-olds are effortlessly easy to please, particularly 14-year-olds who fancy themselves rebels. Take one Motown star, stick a gardenia in her hair, add Billy Dee Williams, a lynching and some heroin, and you’ve got a winner. I started thinking about the movie. Diana Ross? As Billie Holiday? All they share is a one-octave range. And I remember an embarrassing entrance for Williams, where he steps out of the shadow, looks up at the camera Clark Gable-style and the camera holds for a long beat you know was added so that the women in the theater could squeal and slide off their seats, recover and not miss the next line, which was, as I recall, “What’s the matter, don’t you like gardenias?”

OK, so it was howlingly bad. I pounded the steering wheel. Damn these critics, ruining yet another fond memory.

8 Mile Road is never boring. After I did my errand, I meandered into Detroit down Gratiot and stopped at the Eastern Market. Bought some roasted almonds and sour cherry balls. There’re not many afternoons that can’t be improved with salt and sugar.

And in the afternoon, at least one and maybe two more freelance assignments — sputtering and wheezing, my career lurches into its next phase.

So, bloggage: A nice read in the Freep today about Steve Wilson, one of those on-your-side TV guys whose specialty is chasing people down the street. Fortunately for him, some people deserve chasing. Detroit’s mayor, for instance:

TV investigative reporter Steve Wilson and Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick had had other dustups — most notably an incident in Washington, D.C., when Wilson flew there to catch the mayor with a microphone, a camera and an attitude he knew would make compelling, and, some say, revulsive television.

Kilpatrick supporters began shouting for Wilson to back off, to quit harassing the mayor. But the pushing and shoving continued. A child was knocked down in the scrum.

This entertaining anecdote ends with the mayor’s walk-off line, calling Wilson a “fat ass.”

Which he is, but man, have you seen the mayor? He’s got that football-player build, true, but he also looks about one Twinkie away from a diabetes diagnosis.

Two halfway-decent tag sales are calling my name. More later, or maybe not.

This morning is cool and damp, and our — me and the dog, that is — morning walk took twice as long to cover the same distance. For some reason, the ground smelled very, very interesting. I had nowhere I had to be, so I gave him all the time he wanted. He studied that ground. He gave it long, thoughtful sniffs. You could see the little wheels turning.

Most days, I’m pretty happy to be a higher-functioning primate, but on mornings like this I wonder what I would give to be a dog, just for one cool, damp morning. The grass would be your morning newspaper, as Dave Barry once said.

Our neighborhood is also thick with rabbits. Apparently it’s a problem all over the area — the Freep did a story on it, although I’m not going to go looking for linkage — and they’re doing major garden damage. We hardly have a garden at all, but they’ve lopped off the tenderest hosta leaves already. I see piles of bunny poop here and there, and at least once a day the dog flushes one out of the neighbor’s yard. He knows he can’t catch them, but he gives chase anyway; it’s in his contract. The other day he chased one around the swingset twice, both prey and predator giving it about a three-quarter effort before the cottontail bolted for the hole in the fence he always uses for his getaway and the dog came in for his good-boy biscuit.

Why do people read Hollywood gossip columns when they can watch drama in their own back yards?

But speaking of Hollywood: Poor Vonzell. How you gonna keep ’em down at the post office, after they’ve seen Paree? I was kind of rooting for Bo to be booted, after it was clear he had achieved his dream in life: Singing with Lynyrd Skynyrd, or however you spell it. What else can a mediocre rock singer ask from life? On the other hand, I have one more week of amusing, Bice-based wordplay. My favorite (thanks to J.C.B.): Extremism in the defense of liberty is Bo Bice.

I guess he had to make it to the finale, so we could finally see the all-time-best reality-TV ending evah: Bo swings his mic stand one last time, the base comes off and spins into the judges’ table, knocking Paula Abdul senseless. Or rather, more senseless than she usually seems to be.

Ashley, all I can tell you is this: I wouldn’t buy a record by any of these people at gunpoint, but watching them compete against one another is pretty decent entertainment.

Next season, however, I may skip watching the show entirely and confine myself to the recaps on Tvgasm. Much funnier: Vonzell, again, is first. For her, Simon has chosen �On the Radio�, the Donna Summer classic. Vonzell begins and sounds exactly like Summer herself, and then — what�s this — Vonzell breaks out into full-on Jazzercise mode!! Look at her go! Grapevine that shit, Vonzell, Grapevine it, Girl! Listen, only a handful of women can move like that in heels, and 90 percent of those women have penises, so credit where it�s due: Vonz has got the moves.

Man, I’ll be glad when sweeps is over and I can go back to reading in the evenings. Last night Alan worked late and I was sure he’d have to work later after the dramatic season finale of “America’s Next Top Model.” After all, the Detroit girl won.

Someone mentioned the Original Whizzinator (accept no substitutes!) in the comments the other day — it’s basically a device designed to beat drug tests, if one doesn’t mind the idea of wearing a hollow strap-on filled with reconstituted freeze-dried urine. Nothing like being on the cutting edge; the WashPost brings us an amusing account of the Whizzinator’s moment in the congressional sun this week:

The Whizzinator isn’t quite the gold standard in athletic endorsements. Rather, Stupak is bemoaning the ease with which people can buy Whizzinators with credit cards, money orders or checks, and have them delivered by U.S. mail or UPS or FedEx.

It is one of those mornings.

We meet the Whizzinator’s inventor, too:

A press scrum gathers around Dennis Catalano, originator of the Whizzinator. He is one of three representatives from companies that make products that could be used to subvert drug tests who have been compelled (by subpoena) to testify.

Catalano, who owns Puck Technology of Signal Hill, Calif., is something of a Henry Ford figure in this business. There are all manner of urine purifiers and substitutes on the market. But nobody beats the Whizzinator in terms of brand recognition, especially after Onterrio Smith.

But I don’t want to spoil your fun. Go read.

Personally, I think when you start shopping for a Whizzinator, the universe is telling you something. Specifically: “Lay off the pot, hippie-boy.” I’ve been fortunate in the timing of my job changes, vis-a-vis drug testing, which is one way of saying by the time they got started in earnest, I had aged out of the Whizzinator demographic, so to speak. I recall the editor of my newspaper telling us corporate policy would now require drug screenings, but he wanted us to know that a positive test would not necessarily be a deal-breaker for new hires, as far as he was concerned. It would be but one factor among many to consider. He was a good guy.

How things change. A few years later, a good, competent reporter came to fill a temp position and did so admirably. His hiring on a permanent basis would have been a shoo-in, were it not for that urine sample that tested positive for cannabis. (Needless to say, the one-factor-among-many editor had left the building by that point.) “You dumbass,” the editor who broke the bad news said to him, and I can’t blame her for using that word, although we were dumbasses, too, because he would have been an asset to the staff, at least based on his performance. What he does after work is his own business, in my opinion.

But then, every time you say that, you tempt fate, and beckon the forces of irresponsible drug use to start plundering office supplies, to sell for one’s next “fix” of “Acapulco gold.”

I interviewed a restaurant executive chef not long ago, and we got off on a tangent about dealing with owners, who may enjoy the experience of owning a restaurant — so everybody-goes-to-Rick’s, doncha know — but may not know much about the business. She said the owners wanted to institute criminal background checks and drug testing for each and every employee, which was proving to be way more trouble than it was worth. “All I need is a dishwasher,” she moaned. “If I were a dishwasher, I’d be stoned all the time, too. It’s like a job requirement.”

(You know, most days I sit down to update this site with no idea what I’m going to write about; I just sit down and let my subconscious drive. And see how useful it can be? I’m now reminded to prepare a pitch for a magazine story I’ve been wanting to write about my distant cousin, founder of the U.S. Marijuana Party.)

I won’t be seeing the new “Star Wars” movie, non-sucky reviews or no. That’s another demographic I’ve aged out of, and since my own child shows little or no interest in “the Star Wars brand,” as it’s called these days, well, good for me. I capital-E enjoyed the first one; I lowercase-e enjoyed the second. By the time Lucas had stooped to the squeaky Care Bears, I had moved on from Han Solo to the erotic charms of Snake Plissken, thanks very much.

Just reading the reviews makes me smack my forehead. Is there actually a character named “Darth Sidious”? Count Dooku? Boba Fett? Spare me. Or, to put it another way: I’ve got a bad feeling about this.