It seems I start every other entry with “sorry” these days, but it’s called for again. The cold Kate had found me yesterday, and ran me down like a speeding freight. I think it’s a sinus infection, actually — all the signs are there. I had a doctor’s appointment on another matter today, so we killed two birds with one stone. Thank God for general practice, is what I always say.

And thank God that once in a while we get sick, so we have an excuse to lie on the couch on a beautiful summer afternoon and watch “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.” It was, as reviewed, pretty much an incoherent mess, but an entertaining incoherent mess. If I were Demi Moore’s best friend, though, I’d tell her to spend one-tenth of the time she spends on her workout routine watching the occasional Marx Brothers movie. No one ever seems to let her know when she’s in a comedy, and it just embarrasses me. Great abs, though.

OK, so it’s off to bed to let the medicine work. Until we meet again: R.W. Apple on Julia Child.

Sorry for no update last night. Note to self: Don’t get home from weekend fun at 10 p.m. when you have a 3:45 a.m. alarm. It really ruins your blogging time.

Now that that’s done, though, let’s let ‘er rip. I have one question for the assembled today: When the hell did everybody in the world get so ugly?

I’m indebted to our Turkish friends Fatih and Idil for an expression we use in our family. One day, while discussing a trip to Istanbul we’d like to make next summer, I wondered whether a secular American like myself would find parts of the city a little too Muslim for comfort, if you catch my drift. Oh no no no no no, Fatih said; Istanbul is a sophisticated world city. It’s only when you travel farther east that the going might get a little weird. “Eastern Turkey,” then, became our shorthand for any place where the natives make us feel like we’re on the other side of the world.

So Saturday we went to the Branch County Fair in southern Michigan, the quickest trip to Eastern Turkey I’ve yet made. It’s been a while since I’ve felt entirely at home in a crowd of my fellow Americans — about since piercing and tattooing took off like twin rockets from hell — but man oh man, you’d think Michigan wouldn’t be so strange and off-putting, like a trip to prison. Nothing like passing close by a man wearing matching cotton-jersey camo, the shirt emblazoned “Bobby Labonte” to make you wonder where your cosmic ship had washed ashore. How about a 300-pound man with a shoulder-blade-length curly mullet, shaved bald on the sides? His wife smoked a cigarette as long as my arm and nursed what appeared to be a one-gallon flagon of Mountain Dew. Teenage boys wore the sorts of clothes you can’t imagine any female finding attractive — those enormous pants, shirts that showed off armpits and man-boobs, and of course that mutant baseball cap made to be worn backward and pulled down to the tops of the ears.

And the T-shirts! Don’t piss me off, I’m running out of places to hide the bodies … Blondes do it better (this on a woman sporting five inches of roots proving she’s anything but). Tattoos on necks! And everywhere, 50 extra pounds of pudge, bulging over EZ-stretch waistbands and (why? why?!) low-rise jeans.

“When did Michigan turn into eastern Turkey?” I asked Alan.

“Oh, this is the midway,” he said. “And it’s mud-racing night. You go back to the farm buildings, it won’t be this bad.”

And it wasn’t precisely that bad. No, back by the farm buildings you could watch the “Hillbilly Daze” music and comedy review, watched by a knot of veiled Muslim women and their stern-looking menfolk, no doubt enjoying every minute of this immersion in American culture. We’re all in eastern Turkey now.

But a lovely weekend it was, otherwise, except that the cold Kate came down with last week has now moved to Alan, and will probably get me by week’s end, too. We spent the weekend at the lake, enjoying the unseasonably cool weather. Kate’s friend Sophia came over from Ann Arbor, and we took her home Sunday, which made for lots of driving but also the chance to get all moony with yearning for my spiritual hometown. We also saw Fatih and Idil’s new baby, their Yankee doodle dandy, before they head home. Talia is a week old and today’s milestone is Baby’s First Passport Application. You might be wondering, will she have to have her picture taken? Why yes, she will. I can just see the scene at immigration now:

“This isn’t this child! This is Winston Churchill!”

Bloggage: In case my brief meditation on how young people look these days wasn’t depressing enough, you can read this WashPost story about the state of one 26-year-old soul and get even more so.

Roger Ebert called “The Brown Bunny” one of the worst films he’d ever seen. Figures, then, it would need a socko billboard over Sunset Boulevard to really make an impact.

When you read as much news as I do, you quickly have to institute your own filtering devices to set aside the stuff that isn’t interesting or relevant. Generally speaking, I ignore the politics of states where I don’t live, haven’t lived and never expect to live, with exceptions made for good stories, amusing characters and whoppin good yarns (hello, Texas!).

So I don’t really know what to think of the governor of New Jersey declaring himself a poofter, other than a few general impressions, among them:

1) While I’m pleased he came out, even just a few steps ahead of a process server, I’m never fooled by these guys who claim to have just, oops, “discovered” they’re gay. I guess all people are different, but gentlemen, please. Give us some credit.

2) I’m really glad I’m not his wife, but I guess that’s a rock/hard place situation for anyone. You have to sit there and look supportive. Think of Mrs. Kobe; at least she got a big rock on her finger for that duty. All Mrs. New Jersey will get is a divorce settlement that will leave her feeling like the world’s biggest fool.

Or maybe not: As I’ve said approximately a million times, the only people qualified to judge a marriage are the people in it, and sometimes not even them. Mine’s fine, but maybe tomorrow it won’t be. It happens.

OK, then.

Bloggage: Jon Carroll got linked to by Romenesko for today’s column, which if you read it you’ll see is filled with nostalgia for a certain journalistic good old days. But I liked its conclusion:

This wallow in nostalgia was fun, but I do have an actual point to make: If you get a chance to be where stuff seems to be happening, take it. Someone told me last night that Berlin is the new Paris; go to Berlin. Go to Shanghai. Collect a whole lot of memories — you can’t sell them on EBay, but they do sustain you through the harder times to come.

And it doesn’t matter how old you are. Adventure is an equal-opportunity employer. Bangalore is waiting for you, brothers and sisters. Or, of course, you can stay here, because we, too, walk among giants; you have only to open your eyes.

True. Latuh.

Don’t want to load you down with NYT links today, but I thought this essay in Sunday’s book review was necessary. Laura Miller writes on the dearth of serious fiction about what we do for a living, i.e., work. (Although, I must say, she takes the long way around getting there.) This is something I’ve noticed for a while — how often main characters are either married to money or inherited money or do something so vague for their money that we don’t even know what it is. And, face it, for most of us, work blots out the sun. You’d think, in this ambitious age, there’d be more of it in our fiction.

In the annals of human-interest stories, one hardy perennial is this: People Who Screw Up and Don’t Understand Why, Even Though Everyone Else Does. That’s probably why I plowed through this fairly lengthy profile of Tammy Thomas, a disgraced, banned-for-life cyclist trying to rebuild a life wrecked by some fairly obvious doping activity.

(I say “fairly obvious” if only because Thomas looks so drenched in steroids she’s thisclose to sprouting a penis, although that’s probably unfair — I don’t know what she looked like when her training-table diet was strictly over-the-counter. In any event, she’s mistaken for a man regularly.)

Nevertheless, the profile is an interesting picture of a different sort of drug addiction — not to euphoria or oblivion, but winning:

“At some point, the athlete has a choice to stop or keep going,” she said. “But you start to think that if you don’t take something, you’re going to lose. And who’s going to cheer for someone who finishes last in a heat?” She added: “Athletes don’t really care about their bodies. They care more about winning.” … Thomas doubts that anyone in the Olympics is clean because every athlete has “access to a whole medicine cabinet full of drugs.” In 1999, for instance, she said she injected herself with an iron supplement for suckling pigs that she had bought from an online veterinarian. She could not find injectable iron for humans, which is supposed to boost performance. Five years later, at the injection site on her buttocks, there is still a lemon-size black-and-blue mark.

Sad, sad story.

At some point when you’re preparing for company, it doesn’t seem worth the trouble. Who gives a rat’s ass if the damn sink is clean?, you think. Don’t listen; this is the devil talking. In truth, a clean sink is everything your guests want, even though it appears they don’t notice. They do, on a subliminal level. Subliminal is good; it’s what we want when we entertain.

All this by way of saying that supertalented mystery novelist and internationally acclaimed beauty Laura Lippman swung through town Friday on her book tour, and had dinner here at NN.C Central. Emma joined us. We had ourselves a time. We talked and talked and talked, and although I’d like to reproduce at least some of the sparkling conversation, I won’t. Some people like their privacy, and also, I had some wine, and my reporting wouldn’t be reliable. But it was fun, sort of like the Algonquin Round Table with beet salad, and it made me wonder if I oughtn’t run a salon for touring writers. (I could serve my beet salad, which did what it always did; went all the way around the table and ended up back at me, more or less untouched. Beets are a hard sell.) Next up: Hank Stuever? It could happen. Come on down! The guest room sheets are still unslept-upon, and I could make my beet salad.

Anyway, buy Laura’s book, seen here:

It’s very good.

After so much fun, when Saturday brought another in a lovely string of days, I knew we had to seize the moment, so we headed lakeward. I paddled back to the Puddle to see my friends the swans, now down to two cranky parents and one teenage cygnet. The other was nowhere to be seen. A hungry pike? A coyote? Nature, red in tooth and claw, isn’t saying. Whatever happened, it wasn’t because the parents weren’t on the job, because those are some on-the-job swans; one hangs back to threaten intruders with his terrifying, six-foot wingspan. I didn’t do anything to convince him I was friendly, because a healthy distrust of people is good for a wild creature.

And just so I did the full sublime-ridiculous continuum, I took Kate to the sandbar for some swimming later. The sandbar is a spit of shallow water that sticks out from an island in the lake, where people go to stake their boats and tip the brown bottle. I’ve learned to watch out for the rental pontoon boats, and wasn’t disappointed — as we paddled up, a tattooed specimen with what can only be described as a mohawk mullet pointed and hooted, “I need me one-a them! I gotta gets me one-a them!” Whether he was talking about the kayak, me or the 7-year-old in the bow I have no idea; we parked well away. This is, I realize, all payback for the years I spent as a dissipated young adult partying on boats in the U.P. (Is there photographic evidence? Oh, hell yes.

Bloggage:

Confused about the drug war? Jon Carroll explains it all for you.

When Rick James died, I knew the WashPost would do a special appreciation of him, and I knew who would write it. And I was right.

Safari keeps crashing, so I’m gonna go. More tomorrow.

…no time to talk about it. At least, no time to talk about it AND make a stab at getting six hours of sleep, which I’ve vowed to do. So, we’ll see you here tomorrow, which is maybe Monday afternoon, maybe Monday evening.

So does that mean I can sign off…

…’til Tuesday?

Voices carry.

Bye.

The GOP may have all the money in the world, but the Dems have better music. From the NYT, the lineup for a loosely organized tour supporting Democratic candidates:

Representatives of the artists’ coalition said they planned about 34 shows in 28 cities on the tour, called Vote for Change. In Ohio on Oct. 2, for example, Mr. Springsteen, R.E.M., John Fogerty and Bright Eyes are to perform in Cleveland, while the Dave Matthews Band, Jurassic 5 and My Morning Jacket are set to play in Dayton. Meanwhile, Pearl Jam and Death Cab for Cutie are to take the stage in Toledo, and John Mellencamp and Kenneth Edmonds, known as Babyface, are to play in Cincinnati.

Oh, but don’t worry, the Republicans have a lineup, too: Mr. McKinnon added that Mr. Bush had drawn his own support from the entertainment world, citing stars like Lee Ann Womack, Kid Rock and Jessica Simpson.

Rock on.

The background: Katherine Harris, the former Florida secretary of state, the woman who oversaw the 2000 recount, the one who buys mascara by the 55-gallon drum — yes, that one — is running for re-election. And she’s running off at the mouth. You can follow that link, but here’s the gist: While making a campaign stop in Florida, she said the U.S. has thwarted “at least 100 attempts” at terror attacks in this country since September 11, one of them just 100 miles down the road in Carmel, where “a man of Middle Eastern heritage had been arrested in the plot and that explosives were found in his home.”

Carmel’s a suburb of Indianapolis. The plot, Harris said, was to blow up the power grid of the whole area.

Anyway, as near as anyone can figure, no one knows the first damn thing about any of this, including the sheriff and the governor. Of course, as Harris said, this was “classified” information, “although obviously not classified to me.” (Or anyone else, at the moment.)

It seems to me there are a number of conclusions you could reach about this:

1) Katherine Harris is a damn fool; or
2) Blow up the power grid in Indianapolis? What, Louisville wasn’t important enough?

In other crazy-lady news at this hour, Mary Kay Letourneau is out of prison. “Free to love again,” one of my colleagues sighed today. Indeed.

Some years ago, because I was bored and there was nothing else in the video store, I rented “Showgirls.” (My God, I just realized Roger Ebert gave it two stars. TWO stars. Must have gotten all those twinned aereolae on his brain, poor boy.)

Anyway, I rented “Showgirls.” Never have I been so regretful that it was just Alan and me in the room that night. Not that Alan isn’t fun to bounce wisecracks off of, but that’s a movie that requires a houseful of company, well-seeded with the wisecrackiest gay men you know. My friend Ron, with whom I once had a series of bad-movie dates, would have peed his pants over it. At every turn in the story, when the question is: Low road? Or lower road? “Showgirls” just takes a flat-out dive for the one below that, and it is just a hoot. When Elizabeth Berkley licks the pole! Ahhhhhh!

Now Jon Carroll has finally gotten around to seeing it, and I’m pleased to say he adds significantly to the “Showgirls” canon. Describing a …well, I guess you’d call it a “love” scene:

Kyle has this very large house out in the desert, and behind the very large house is a very large swimming pool, and after a night of flirtation, Kyle and Elizabeth find themselves making the showgirl with two backs in the shallow end.

And this goes on. And on. And on. It goes on beyond all reason; you could go get popcorn at the beginning of the scene and still get back in time for the final 45 thrashes.

So who wants to have a “Showgirls” party? Invite me!