Yes, I know the site was down. My e-mail was down, too. I don’t know what happened, but my guess would be: Ivan threw a branch over a wire somewhere in the American south, where my site lives, and so we were all made to suffer. (Yes, I’m being smartass here. I saw those houses.) But things are back now, and I received three days worth of e-mail. 110 pieces were backed up in the pipeline, I saw. A moment later, the computer chirped that the sorting was over, and the important stuff was ready to read. In the in-box: 10 pieces. Ten! And one was spam that slipped the filter! Ratio of spam:important stuff, more than 10:1.

Then I did the daily spam-comment/blacklist chore. Nine more pieces there. It reminded me of a conversation this weekend, in Columbus, where Kate and I went to celebrate my brother’s birthday. I was helping him do internet research on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which meant I was doing all the research, because my brother doesn’t own a computer and is where everyone else in the world was approximately 15 years ago, saying, “A what? A browser? What’s that?”

“Hey, I’m getting pretty good at this,” he said, when I left him on his own and he figured out the “back” button, after accidentally quitting the program three times in a row.

“Well, when you finally decide to go online,” my sister said. “Promise me you’ll get a Mac.”

He said no no noooo, he’d be getting a PC, “because then you can get Windows.” My sister and I exchanged a glance, and I wondered how long it would be before he sends all his credit-card numbers to a Nigerian oil minister, as security on that Swiss bank account number he’d be getting under separate cover.

(He’s not that stupid, but he’s also got some catching up to do. I actually used to hit “unsubscribe” on spam e-mail, thinking it would stem the tide. Silly me.)

So that’s what I did this weekend: Go to Columbus. Which meant? Yes, shopping! Nothing for me, but baby got two cute new pairs of shoes, from Nordstrom’s. Yes, I paid too much, but I didn’t pay as much as I could have — no $65 kiddie Birkenstocks for us, no $110 European brands with delicate leaf patterns — and what the hell, the kid’s been wearing Target shoes all her life. One pair of genuine Merrell jungle mocs in fuschia is not the crime of the century.

There’s nothing like the Nordstrom’s children’s shoe department to make the class fractures of American life stand out to the casual observer. A man in his 50s, but still obviously the father of this 4-year-old, picks out five pairs of shoes bing bam boom and pays by credit card: That’ll be $265, sir. He may die before he gets to walk his daughter down the aisle at her wedding, but he’ll leave a nice estate. A couple who look as though they can obviously afford it pick up the delicate leaf-pattered Euro pair, turn them over, make exasperated lip noises at the $110 price tag, put them back on the shelf. A hassled Somali clerk in a hijab waits on all with seemingly endless patience and good humor, more than any of her customers. But then, she works for Nordstrom’s. Patience and good humor is their stock in trade. Along with shoes.

Kate loves her shoes, and still loved them after she was denied a trip to Build-a-Bear. The Carrie Bradshaw of 2027. Although Carrie would never wear Merrells.

Today we went down both water slides at the Westerville Community Center, then took the shoes home to show daddy. Life as a kid is pretty good, if you’ve got the right address. Ask the Somali.

I think I want to do work like this. So much more interesting than city council meetings or writing headlines.

Someone e-mailed me this morning. Subject line: Just another howl of despair. The text, paraphrased and shortened but only by a word or three: God I just f*cking hate this election.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. When people are in pain, they say “ouch.” Very succinct.

On the other hand, there’s something to be said for the longer explication of pain and disgust, which is why I also enjoyed my buddy Lance Mannion’s blog debut today, particularly this entry.

Welcome, Lance.

The last hot day for a while, I fear. We’re supposed to get rain tonight, and the temperature will fall by 10 degrees tomorrow. The radar picture on weather.com shows the squall line far to the west in Lake Michigan, just off the western Michigan shoreline, headed this way. I suspect it’ll hit around the time Ivan comes ashore down in the Gulf. Now that will be something, won’t it? The WashPost had a hurricane-bears-down-on-New-Orleans story today that was truly apocalyptic, with such phrases as “10,000 body bags” and “won’t be enough.” Now that the storm has re-aimed itself, it looks as though New Orleans will be spared the worst, but when you’re 10 feet below sea level, that may be a relative statement.

If you’re ever in New Orleans, try the muffuletta at the Napoleon House. Can’t be beat.

One of my colleagues and I have been trading journalese cliches over the desk the last couple weeks.

“Why are all bodies ‘badly decomposed’?” he’ll ask, scanning wire copy.

I’ll reply, “Why are all task forces ‘spearheaded’?”

“Why are all tackles ‘bone-crunching’?”

“Why do committees require ‘facilitators’?”

And so on. These last few weeks of hurricane coverage have provided lots of fodder. When you have so many so quickly, you run out of verbs: Pounded, lashed, drenched, battered. And nouns: Fury, force, punch. And adjectives: torrential, hellacious, howling. All storms “pack” winds, we noticed today. (“That’s because you can’t carry them on,” someone said. “They’re banned under TSA guidelines.”) We need some new words. Maybe this:

Hurricane Ivan assaulted the Gulf Coast today, flogging the coastline with waves and wind that scoured beaches, separated roofs from houses and dampened residents and structures alike.

Maybe not.

Bloggage: Working in the newspaper business these days sometimes feels like you’re fighting a multi-front war. Tim Porter covers one skirmish.

My friend Carolyn, of West Palm Beach, Fla. is a saint among women. In the comments below — the post where I whined about my spotty broadband service — she points out that she’s still waiting for plain old electricity, and likely won’t get it until Saturday. “I’m at peace with it,” she remarks. It’s this kind of patience that makes her a friend to young reporters everywhere, and cranky old columnists, too.

But let’s all hold hands and send her some good karma, eh? A girl needs electricity.

My hours may be punishing, but I have to confess I’m growing very fond of my brief, 8-minute commute in these last days of summer, especially in the morning. I open the sunroof, turn on the jazz station and roll through the deserted streets of south Fort Wayne, groovin’ on the Islamic moon (last week — it’s gone now) off in the east, and Venus and Orion and the Big Dipper, all visible through the hole in the top of the car. Last week at the doughnut shop I asked the proprietor if he had to deal with a lot of drunks; he said no, he opened at 4 and they were pretty much all gone by then.

“I’ll have a couple of those crullers there,” I said.

“Huh? Oh, you mean the croissants,” he said.

The amazing world of 4 a.m. doughnuts.

And the first 90 minutes or so at work, that’s my favorite time. It’s quiet, no phones ring, you get a lot of work done, and best of all: You get to listen to the police scanner.

“These people have been watching ‘CSI,’ they want a fingerprint technician,” a weary cop voice told the dispatcher the other morning. I hear about drunks who won’t go home, welfare checks on grandmas who haven’t answered their phone in a while and my personal favorite, domestic disputes — “CP reports yelling and screaming from the downstairs apartment.” “Where do people find the energy to fight at 5:30 in the morning?” I asked no one in particular the other day. Five-thirty has earned the right to be peaceful — the drunks should be abed, the chronically angry not up yet. The only people who should be stirring are copy editors on p.m. newspapers and raccoons. No wonder police get all bitter and become Republicans. I would too.

Lovely weather continues, although the clouds are starting to press down — I’m sure a front is headed this way that will make things more September-like. The tomatoes are taking the opportunity to ripen and all the kids are wearing shorts and T-shirts to school. I bought a chicken Saturday for September’s First Roast Chicken — a tradition in my kitchen — but it’s just sitting there, waiting for the A/C to be turned off and roast chicken weather to arrive. I think it’s going to have to be cleavered into a fryer if a front doesn’t move through soon.

My in-laws eat the same food 52 weeks a year. It mystifies me.

Good bloggage today: Alex took a month off, and comes back with a nice entry about his parents’ 50th anniversary, which they celebrated this past weekend. It’s not so much about the anniverary as about his parents, until it starts being about Shelley Long’s mother. Just go check it out.

(Alex and I decided to go to the AIDS Task Force dinner dance next month, the social event of the season for the GLBT community. I plan to go as a soccer mom. Fully report later.)

And longtime NN.C commenter Lance Mannion is setting up his own blog, which I hope won’t take him away from NN.C’s comments section. He has it up, but there’s nothing much there yet, so I’ll wait until later in the week to give you the URL. I’ve only been telling him to do this for years; I’m glad he finally decided to do so.

Planning a vasectomy? Don’t read this. OK, go ahead, if only to get to such pungent passages as this: Thirteen hours later I was in an NHS bed having my bloody and swollen scrotum stitched.

I love Brits. Such pungent language: I had heard only good things about the snip: a friend was on the footy pitch after five days; my dad – admittedly a Liverpool docker, rather than a keyboard-tapping softie like me – went straight to the pub and used Guinness for pain relief. What is “the footy pitch,” anyway? From Googling, I think it might be “soccer field,” but who knows? It could be “the marital bed.”

OK, then. “About Schmidt” is on digital cable, which means I’m outta here.

I’m not posting anything tonight because I hate either:

1) My internet provider;
2) My broadband modem;
3) Something else that screws up my connection for hours at a time, requiring that I disconnect everything, chant incantations over it and try again.

So we’ll try for something tomorrow.

P.S. I only had two margaritas yesterday. One peach, one mango. Mmmm.

The weekly newsletter from Kate’s school arrived the other day, and took note of how disappointed the teacher was that so many children flunked the first spelling test. This wasn’t the case with our student — coff, coff, 100 percent, coff — but all I can say is: She better be getting perfect scores. The other day I heard some bad language rising from our basement playroom, not from Kate, and I mentioned it later, after everybody left.

“I heard Jayna use a swear word,” I said. “I don’t want to hear that around here. Would you say something to her about it? It’s not a big hairy deal, but just say something. It’s a bad habit to get into.” (Believe me, I know.)

“What word was it?”

“We don’t need to get into that,” I said. “You’re old enough to recognize a swear word when you hear it.”

“Was it the one spelled D-I-P-S-H-I-T?”

As a matter of fact, it was, but what does a parent say at this point? Here’s what I said:

“Yes. Excellent spelling, by the way.”

Mommy’s little longshoreman.

I’m writing this early in the afternoon Sunday, because I seem to have a problem staying sober later in the day this weekend. Our friend Dr. Frank is in town this weekend, back from Madison, Wis., where he recently moved. Since he doesn’t have a house anymore, he threw a cocktail party for a few friends at the country club Friday night. (Oh, how I love to say to my sitter, “We’ll be at the country club if anything happens.”) Last night was Rockin’ Docs, the event he returned for. It’s a music fest in which bands of doctors indulge their fantasies of being Mick Jagger. Never have so many kind souls suffered through so many bad covers for such a good cause. (This year: The free clinic and a couple of cancer charities.)

Frank’s band, Frankie and the Bananas, is the best of the lot. They have a few standout moments, including “Wipe Out,” which features Alan’s allergist on drums, who is quite good. They also have a great introducing-the-band riff: “And on guitar and vocals … Fort Wayne’s only forensic pathologist … his patients never complain…” The best was some years ago, when the band’s sole lawyer, one of the best defense attorneys in the city, was called out thusly: “If he’d been James Brown’s lawyer…he wouldn’t be in jail today…”

I think the allergist was introduced as “the king of itch, the sultan of sneeze.” Can’t remember exactly. (This was later in the evening.)

And now it’s Sunday. Another beautiful day we probably should be spending at the lake, but it’s so beautiful I don’t even care. Took two long, long bike rides today and yesterday, penance for the drinking that didn’t feel like penance. Yesterday I did my Crazy Lady With a Plate in Her Head act again. It was the golf carts. Again. In the park closest to our house, the walking/biking path encircles a small, par-3 golf course, used at least in part by lazy buttheads who believe the people on the paved path are being tolerated by generous duffers, not the other way around. They’re not supposed to drive their carts onto the path, but they do anyway, and it makes me insane. I suspect some of them are drunk and are paying zero attention; I’ve seen many near-misses. My absolute favorite is when they hit their ball so far out of bounds that it goes across the paved path, and then they drive the goddamn cart across the path so they don’t have to walk more than eight inches to actually hit the thing.

Sometimes they actually park the cart on the path to do this. At times like this I’m glad I don’t carry the pepper spray I’m always meaning to buy for self-defense, because someone would get a faceful.

It looks as though, when it comes to fishkeeping, our family has a dry thumb. The guppies started dying a week or so ago, Cheetah and Rainbow and, heartbreakingly, Small Fry. Now we’re down to one. That would be Lightning, who’s been moved to a bowl because evidently her tank is toxic. Also, we suspect she may be pregnant, although the way things have been going, the black dot in her tummy is probably cancer. Alan, fed up, did what he always does: Fire up the internet and throw some money at the problem. Now we’re “shocking” the tank with plants and ammonia, waiting a week or more for the nitrates to go up, or go down, or go wherever they need to go. Evidently you need a chemistry degree to keep guppies, which came as a surprise to me. So much for all that “hardy little fish” crap. Hang on, Lightning.

And now for Sunday’s drinking, off to a nearby Mexican restaurant to lift a margarita in farewell to a colleague, whose last day was Friday. I stopped in at a doughnut shop at 4:45 a.m. Friday for the traditional last-day sendoff of grease and sugar. A retail establishment is a strange place to be at that hour, and when the doorbell rang as I was paying and I looked up to see who was entering, my heart fluttered a bit in alarm. The man was African American, and I chided myself for sublimated racism, until I figured it out: He was a dead ringer for Avon Barksdale, the evil drug lord at the center of “The Wire.” Which starts its new season Sept. 19.

(How did that paragraph go from margaritas to “The Wire”? It’s a mystery to me, too. We just make this stuff up as we go along.)

Bloggage: Gene Weingarten challenges the nation’s poet laureate to a duel. Funny.

Lex Alexander, who sometimes comments at this address, takes note of this story in the WashPost, about the Secret Service’s creative new approach to obnoxious but nonviolent hecklers at Bush campaign events, which apparently involves removing women by their hair, among other things, and includes this chilling paragraph:

One uniformed Secret Service agent complained to a colleague that “the press is having a field day” with the disruption — and the agents quickly clamped down. Journalists were told that if they sought to approach the demonstrators, they would not be allowed to return to the event site — even though their colleagues were free to come and go. An agent, who did not give his name, told one journalist who was blocked from returning to the speech that this was punishment for approaching the demonstrators and that there was a “different set of rules” for reporters who did not seek out the activists.

Lex wrote to Romenesko about it, and since he doesn’t permalink individual letters, I’m just going to paste it here. I don’t think anyone will mind:

MEMO

I’m just sayin’.

Yeah, Lex, me too.

One my my web hosts, one of the Two Guys, asked the other day why I wasn’t writing more about politics. I said something to the effect that it makes steam pour out my ears and my brainpan gets all sizzly. Does the world need another sizzly brainpan attached to a yapping mouth? Don’t think so. Besides, it’s useless. All we’re doing now is choir-preaching, and the choir is sick of us. Those documents are a forgery! World Net Daily says so, so it must be true!

Better to talk about dinner, and work, and “Jeopardy!” Kate and I have started watching “Jeopardy!” together. She’s utterly unimpressed by my prowess, and still brags about the time she, a mere 7-year-old, got Final Jeopardy correct, and I didn’t. (It’s the only Olympic sport played without shoes. My stupid guess: What is rhythmic gymnastics? Kate’s smart one: What is beach volleyball?) The news leaked today that Ken Jennings was finally defeated, but we’ll have to wait for the taped cycle to catch up. Good, I say; that guy is getting annoying.

I was going to post a dog photo today; we celebrated the Sprigster’s 13th birthday this week. Thirteen! I can hardly believe it. He got a bath and grooming that day, which displeased him but made us happy, and him happy in the long term — a clean dog is a petted-more-often dog. We took him to the Rollin’ Rovers Dog Barkery, purveyor of homemade gourmet dog treats. He got a selection of livery and cheesy snacks, plus a dog lollipop — a sizable biscuit baked onto a rawhide chewy stick. Our ongoing campaign to teach him to talk continues at something of a plateau. When you say “bow wow” he barks twice; “bow wow wow” and he barks three times. However, a single bark for “bow” eludes us.

This is my life: Pampering my dog, middlebrow TV and “Hardball.” No wonder my brainpan is simmering.

Bloggage:

My screenwriting professor said, “If you have any scenes of people on telephones in your scripts, cut them, or else make them as short as possible. Phone conversation is deadly in a movie.” David Edelstein disagrees.

That James Wolcott, he funny. And about Norman Podhoretz, no less.

Hurricane Ivan destroys a prison, and everybody escapes. Some, I read, were prisoners from the 1983 coup that led to the U.S. invasion. Ivan. Hmm.

Why I will never get plastic surgery. If Jessica Simpson can’t get a boob job that doesn’t go wrong, how can I ever hope to?

Oh, and Poor Meg Ryan. It must be awful to have to depend on your looks to make a living. Fortunately, this has never been a problem for me. Fortunately. Ha.

True story: I finished my project today at….4:59 p.m. When quittin’ time comes at quittin’ time, life is good.

Of course, I sat down at my other desk at 4:59 a.m., so the day wasn’t exactly a cakewalk. Still, the last half of it was done at my very own desk w/view and breeze. There’s work you do to afford to do the work you do, and do be do be do this sentence makes no sense. Perhaps I should pour myself a glass of wine. At least then I’d have an excuse.

(Later.)

I no longer care if the sentences make no sense. What is it costing you to be here?

What a gorgeous weekend. Although I’ve found the lovely, coolish summer heavenly, it was nice to get one last blast of sunny ‘n’ hot before we have to give it all up. We went to the lake, of course — four adults, a kid, a bird and a dog crammed into our 450-square-foot cottage, and for once, no one got on my nerves, not once. The lake never got to that bathwater temperature it frequently is by now, so swimming was sublime. Paddling was better, except that the swans are gone. The red-winged blackbirds are gone, too. But the ducks were all over the place, so I don’t know what that means, whether they’re flocking before migration or just taking advantage of the crabby swan family’s absence to enjoy the nice real estate. But all around, everything’s ready to die. The lily pads are the size of trashcan lids, and looking sort of peeled up at the edges. The weed beds are a bit stinky. The air has that slanty look. It’s dark at 8. Deep sigh.

But I’m a grownup, and I get off work at 1 p.m. Still a few weeks of the good stuff for me.

Of course, I don’t live in Florida. Carolyn? You guys OK down there? Keeping those shutters up?

(By the way, let’s ask Pat Robertson if God is trying to tell Florida something with all these hurricanes, why don’t we? “Don’t try any funny stuff with the voting this time, Jeb,” maybe? Just wondering.)

I don’t want to change the subject too abruptly, but I stumbled across one of those cool Find Out Which Presidential Candidate Your Neighbors Are Donating To sites, and I could scarcely tear myself away. I did some zip-code surfing (recommended), some last-name surfing (also recommended), and found, when I looked up, 45 minutes had passed. I discovered my distant relative-by-marriage, Loretta Nall, who is semi-famous for being an unjustly persecuted pothead, gave $750 to Dennis Kucinich. A Mrs. Nancy W. Nall (not I) gave $500 to Dubya. The real revelation was the zip code of my upbringing, 43221, which apparently is going for Kerry to a degree I find astonishing. It was — it is — heavy-duty GOP country, and yet it appears to have turned into San Francisco, with Buckeye football. I may have to move back.

I never paid much attention to Slate’s The Fray, their reader-participation feature, but maybe I should:

I already knew (Zell Miller) was nuts when he set forth his basic premise. He said that this election is all about terrorism, and that he was planning to vote for Bush because Bush was “the only man” he could trust to “protect my children.”

And moreover, how come I can go to work 5 blocks from the New York Stock Exchange every day and not be scared of these fuckers, and “this old marine” can’t drive his grandkids to Sunday School in Boola-Boola, Georgia without seeing bomb-toting mullahs in the shrubbery?

Long live snark.

Tomorrow: Highs in the low 70s, mostly sunny. More, please more.

Just a pop-in here — I’m still on self-imposed deadline (aren’t they all?) — but I saw this in my meanderings today and thought, oh, how long will it take to throw it out there?

James Wolcott’s new blog hardly needs my promotion. But this post was as succinct a distillation of Mel Gibson as anything I’ve read in the last five years. So enjoy.

And just to be bipartisan about it, He’s got it in for Tony Kushner, too.

In other news at this hour, I went to a party this afternoon, and went home early after I got cat shit on my shirt. I’ll leave the filthy details to your imagination.