My sister was known in her day as a great hula-hoop talent. She probably could have gone pro, although I admit this all happened before I knew her, or before I was old enough to remember. Anyway, one of the great joys of parenthood is watching your child’s talents emerge, and I’ve been waiting for Kate’s to come along. We can already see a couple — she’s a good writer, for instance, imagine that — but I’m waiting for the prodigy-level gifts for music or athletics that will allow her to become rich, world-famous and, most important, able to support us in our old age.

I think we’ve found it; she has inherited her aunt’s ability to keep that thing going for minutes on end. As soon as hula-hooping becomes eligible for Title IX scholarships, we’ll at least have college covered.

The dog isn’t the only one who pudged up a bit in the past year. He didn’t have the long walks he was used to, and gained maybe a pound or two, which I didn’t notice until I buckled on his life jacket the other weekend, and …

(Yes, in case you’re wondering, I *can* hear myself. A dog with a life jacket. While children starve.)

Anyway, it occurred to me it wouldn’t hurt either of us to get back on our regular dog-walking routes, about a mile or so each in all directions from our house. So off we trotted south on Indiana, a few blocks we know well, but of course, it’s been a while. Some houses have been painted, some trees have been cut down, and what’s this? It’s an older woman who’s been there for years, only…she’s changed. She’s sitting on the front porch, hair wild and uncombed, drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon. At first I thought it was a man, but no.

I remember when Sprig was a pup, she was your basic neighborhood old lady. She’d call him over and pet him and talk about her own terrier. This time she called him over and sort of petted him drunkenly. “Where’s your dog?” I asked. “He…died,” she said in a small voice. Somehow, I got the idea the rest of it — the transformation to the sort of old lady who no longer combs her hair and drinks PBRs on the stoop — is related to the dog’s exit.

Anyway, we walked on. The dog pooped three times. Afterward he looked five pounds thinner.

Linkage: The other day, when Mike Ditka’s name was being floated as a possible Senate candidate, I remarked to a friend that the Republicans have reached their decadent phase, like the left was c. 1970 or so, when Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman were considered intellectuals and had book deals. Well, I was wrong. It can still get far, far worse, like, when Ditka opts to keep his hat on his head and the next name we hear is …Ted Nugent.

(My question: Wouldn’t he have to relocate from Michigan?)

Alex wrote something nice this week about the Jeffries Cemetery in Whitley County, which he visited recently and which, depending on who you talk to, is or isn’t an African-American graveyard from the 19th century. A few years ago, Fort Wayne hosted a national genealogical conference, and a reporter from our paper talked to a woman who was researching black families, in part by visiting the Jeffries Cemetery, where, she said, many were buried.

The phone rang early the next morning, from a highly irritated woman saying, hello, those are my relatives and I’m not black. The photos of the people in question were, to my eye, unequivocal — Negroid features and hair, the whole bit. It turns out they were probably Melungeon, mixed-blood people born of black slaves, Native Americans and southern Europeans. It all seemed like a quibble, but this area is rural and people are still tetchy about such things.

If Seymour Hersh is right, we are so screwed.

If you and your spouse haven’t swapped domestic duties lately, give it a try. With Alan running the kitchen these days, I’m making all sorts of new discoveries. He brought home Hebrew National hot dogs the other day, which I never buy because they’re more expensive. Alan has a different rationale: “I figured there were fewer dicks ‘n’ lips in ’em.” Anyway, I’m kicking myself for not buying them myself — they’re the best franks I’ve had in years, and what a great slogan. “We answer to a higher power.” Mmmm.

Question: If exercise is so damn good for you — and yes, your honor, I’ll stipulate that it is — why is it so hard to get motivated to do it? Why do you spend the first 20 minutes of a workout thinking, “God, I should bag this”? Why is it accompanied by injury, pain and sweating?

Just asking. I got back on the bike today after a week off, and the trip from the back door to the garage felt like climbing Everest. At the end of the hour I was happy I’d done it, as I always am, but why is the first 15 minutes such a pain? Just asking.

“I want a form of exercise that’s like sex. You want to do it, you work a while, you get a reward, then you go to sleep. Now that’s exercise.” — my friend Jeff Borden, who as far as I know never found this holy grail, but does ride his bike.

I was happy I did it, but I was happy to get home, too. We’re in the dog days of summer — mid-80s and armpit-mildew humid, and an hour of strenuous exercise with a styrofoam hat on will make you, uh, bloom. I felt as though my brain was about to poach.

Remind me of this in January.

Has anybody here ever done a punishingly early work schedule? Send your secrets on coping — I need some tips. I’m in search of the elusive bedtime that allows one to survive on just the night’s sleep and not need a supplemental p.m. nap. I’ve been going to bed at 10, but damn, 3:55 a.m. is simply an insane hour for an alarm. “Do you lie there and hit the snooze three or four times?” someone asked me. Answer: Hail no, I don’t dare. I’m out of bed at 3:55:10, because if I don’t get up immediately I won’t make it up at all. Needless to say, coffee is my middle name. No, “Six Cups” is. Caffeine is a vitamin.

Like exercise, once I get going I’m fine, but oh — that getting going.

It helps to read bracing columns first thing in the a.m. Here’s one. Here’s another. (Both are unkind to our president; Republicans beware.)

And then there’s this, Hollywood at its finest.

Me, I’m going to bed.

I know one of the great social movements of our time is a return to orthodoxy in all religions, but you’ll not catch me on that train. I’m enjoying the great cafeteria of secularism and pick-and-choose religious entrees too much.

Also, I mix my metaphors into a great big melting pot. What-evuh.

Anyway, last Friday was the memorial …I guess service isn’t quite the correct word. OK, memorial party for my old neighbor Chuck, who died last month. It was a blast, I must say, and if my own memorial has half as interesting a guest list, generates one-third as many funny stories and has food even a quarter as good, I’ll consider it a life well-lived.

In the middle of it all a half-dozen Buddhist monks showed up and chanted. I missed the beginning, but someone said it was one of those send-your-soul-to-the-afterlife chants, and I loved it — so strange and hypnotic. To my knowledge Chuck wasn’t a Buddhist, but in the photo collage in the dining room was a shot of him posing with a bunch of monks, so they must have had some sort of connection. As a rule I’m not much for new-age religion, and I think Madonna and her kabbalah is just silly. But I’m grateful I’ve reached a point in my life where monks and I appear on the same guest lists.

I just read a story about elections in the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church; apparently they’ve been squabbling amongst themselves, ever since a post-9/11 prayer service in which one of their clergyman participated in an ecumenical prayer service with non-Christians. This is a violation of their doctrine, and the synod leader’s failure to suspend the offending minister is cause of great offense among more conservative members.

To which I can only say: Sheesh. Chant on, monks.

Saturday: Fabulous fellow Fellow Fatih came up to the lake with his preggo wife Idil for one last lazy afternoon before their yankee doodle dandy shows up later this month. We drank wine and did the usual lakey things, including ice cream with raspberries from our very own bushes. Isn’t summer wonderful?

Sometimes a girl’s gotta take care of herself. No, sometimes a girl’s just gotta touch up her roots. I tried a new place today, figuring what the hell, let’s make a fresh start.

I like a haircut, personally. I take off my glasses — the hair color gets all over them — and the world goes all swimmy. I hold the fashion magazines right up to my nose, so it looks like I’m really, really interested in 10 Fun Looks For Summer. Today, I read Us, which is not a fashion magazine, more like a gossip rag for people who find People too intellectual. I marveled at all the stars who’ve flown under my radar — who the hell is Marc Anthony, besides the new Mr. J-Lo? Could you pick Tara Reid out of a police lineup? I couldn’t. In the midst of all this, a handsome blur appeared to my left, and asked if I’d like a complimentary hand massage.

Why, certainly.

As he got closer, he came into somewhat sharper focus. Young guy, the new massage therapist at the salon. Works on men and women, prefers an eclectic rub style, said he likes to get to work and then “see what I find,” which sounds sort of dirty when I write it down, but really it wasn’t. He squirted some Aveda lotion on my hand and got to work. Of course it felt marvelous. We made small talk, although I noticed my voice was getting softer and quieter, doubtless a side effect of having my palms rubbed and my fingers handled the way a farmer handles the teats on an udder. It’s hard for me to make small talk without slipping into reporter mode: Where did you go to massage school, young man? Las Vegas, really? What was that like? Have you ever been to the Bellagio? And so on.

Asking questions gives you an opportunity to drift away between them, although I learned a bit — Bellagio waitresses wear fitted suits, with short skirts, but otherwise somewhat tasteful. Las Vegas is a strange place to be a permanent resident. It wasn’t so bad for a while, but he’s glad to be back. He worked as a lifeguard while he went to school, at a hotel pool.

He finished up after about 10 minutes, and there was an awkward tip-me moment, which I ignored. My mitts were feeling too good in the immediate afterglow to go diving into my purse for a fiver, and besides, he said “complimentary.” (Relax. I tipped him when I left.)

People should touch one another in a massage-like manner more often. This is something I firmly believe. Ten minutes with this guy, and I was ready to set him up in an apartment. I liked my cut and color, too, so it was a pretty good afternoon.

Alan’s downstairs listening to “After Bathing at Baxter’s.” All that Grace Slick wailing — sometimes our domestic soundtrack is a little strange. Me, I’m old-skool; you’ll never top “Surrealistic Pillow” in my book. When I had my radio show, the engineer sometimes used the long intro to “She Has Funny Cars” for bumper music, at my request.

Linkage: When Jon Carroll is funny, he frequently captures a certain effervescent goofiness that’s as light and delicate as a soap bubble, but still, just right.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand nyah nyah nyah nyah nyahs.

“July Surprise” = no surprise.

You have a swell weekend, and I’ll see you after it’s over.

It looks as though we’ve found a bit of breathing space. Chores are more or less caught up, the home front is in confident hands (i.e., not mine), we’re only two days to the weekend. Yee-haw.

One reason I’ve been a bit discombobulated of late is the extreme schedule adjustment since Ann Arbor. I now arrive at work at 5 a.m., an hour so early it generally needs an extra adjective — “ungodly,” say. But little by little, it’s growing on me, sort of. The 3:55 alarm is always a shock, but as early birds all over the world know, there’s some pleasure in being one of the few, the proud, the ambulatory-before-dawn.

My drive to work is over in a jif with so little traffic, but there’s lots to like about it while it lasts. The just-getting-home people, out wandering Creighton Avenue. The members-only Black Pistons MC storefront, frequently still open, with a sturdy bearded biker or two shooting pool until last-man-standing. The sleepy faces in Tom’s Donuts. The open-all-night Taco Bell, downtown. And, of course, “Coast to Coast.”

It’s been a good while since I was up in the wee hours doing much other than nursing a baby or having insomnia, and neither activity is well-suited to radio listening. So I missed the whole Art Bell era, when “Coast to Coast” put itself on the map, with its all-night collection of ghost-hunters, paranormal spoon-benders and, of course, aliens.

An alien called the other morning on my drive in. He said he was a “visitor,” or a “newcomer” or an “ambassador” or something like that, the gist being: He was just now realizing his human form was an illusion, or maybe closer to a shell. He was a one-man sleeper cell for an alien force, and he was awakening to his mission, although it wasn’t entirely clear yet.

“How does one know if you’re one of these?” the host queried.

“You feel estranged from your family,” the man said, among other things. Well, that’s helpful.

The best thing about a 5 a.m. factory whistle? Quittin’ time comes at 1 p.m. One of these days I’ll figure out the magical bedtime that enables me to get through the rest of the day without needing a little nap. It is summer, after all; I should be working on my tan.

A few things you might enjoy reading:

Gwynne Dyer speaks the uncomfortable truth about our involvement in Iraq:

So once more, with feeling: the 9/11 attacks were not aimed at American values, which are of no interest to the Islamists one way or another. They were an operation that was broadly intended to raise the profile of the Islamists in the Muslim world, but they had the further quite specific goal of luring the United States into invading Muslim countries.

The true goal of the Islamists is to come to power in Muslim countries, and their problem until recently was that they could not win over enough local people to make their revolutions happen. Getting the U.S. to march into the Muslim world in pursuit of the terrorists was a potentially promising stratagem, since an invasion should produce endless images of American soldiers killing and humiliating Muslims. That might finally push enough people into the arms of the Islamists to get their stalled revolutions off the ground.

And my friend Jones speaks the somewhat less compelling truth about Bob Knight. If anyone still cares, that is:

Let me tell you something. Knight would never allow anyone to see it. But he’s hurting right now.

And, for a competitor such as Knight, this is indigestible. It’s the cruelest of punishments.

Irrelevance! Who doesn’t know that feeling? Sometimes, anyway.

More tomorrow.

I may have found a true anomaly, even for Fort Wayne — a 50-cent movie house. The holiday snuck up on us, and the forecast threatened rain off and on all day, so we decided to bag a trip to the overcrowded lake and stay in the Fort for our nation’s birthday. Isn’t that what Independence Day is all about? Doing something different? It’s what I always say, anyway.

So off we went to the movies, something we haven’t done for a while. I can’t wait until I can take Kate to “Godfather” film festivals and the like, but for now I have to sit through “Ella Enchanted.” Which, I reminded myself, at least isn’t “Garfield.” And at $10.50 for two admissions, a large popcorn and two drinks, you can’t say the price isn’t right.

What to say about “Ella Enchanted”? How about this: Sometimes Roger Ebert is too kind. And this: If they gave an Oscar for Best Rip-Off, it’d be a shoo-in. Any more would be a waste of words, but it did get me to thinking about when you start telling kids that stuff stinks. I had a neighbor who believed, strongly, that it’s wrong to express value judgments to children on things like movies, TV shows and books. He thought you had to respect children’s opinions, and if they thought “Dragonball Z” was art, well, then that’s what it is.

Not surprisingly, I disagree. “How are they supposed to develop standards of taste?” I asked. The conversation went nowhere. But it’s something I’ve wondered about ever since, because I’ve loudly and frequently shared my opinions about TV and books and movies with Kate since she was big enough to listen. I tell her she can watch Mary-Kate and Ashley TV shows and movies, but we’re not buying book versions of the same stories, because they’re for dull-witted children who can’t be persuaded to read otherwise, so check out this Narnia story instead. This is going to blow up in my face one of these days, I know; her teenage rebellion will probably take the form of writing novelizations for Strawberry Shortcake cartoons, or at the very least I’ll insult someone’s mother. But I don’t care. I remember my mom scowling when a second-grade birthday-party entertainment included seeing “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.” But she took me to see “The Godfather” when I was in seventh grade, something lots of parents would have found equally inappropriate. I got the message: ’70s cinema rules.

But for today, I told her I thought “Ella Enchanted” was OK, but “Shrek” was better. We’ll leave the rougher film criticism for a few years down the road.

I did a little traveling last week. There’s nothing like flying into Fort Wayne, especially from O’Hare, to convince yourself you live in a first-class city. How long has it been since you boarded a plane from a major airport and didn’t use a jetway to do it? At O’Hare, you get to Fort Wayne by passing through gate F1, going down some stairs, crossing a long stretch of tarmac past three or four small, idling jets in whatever cursed airline feeder service has the contract at the moment. Then you board your own Fort-bound aircraft by climbing the steep stairs the fold out of the main door. Where are we going? you think. East Methane? No, East Methane probably has a bigger airport.

Advantages: 1) You don’t have to wear roller skates to get from one gate to another, because there are only eight. 2) Free wi-fi in the airport.

And now the sun is setting on the Fourth of July, so it’s off to the fireworks. Which are already going on in our neighborhood at the moment — the illegal stuff sold on every corner for a month previous are now exploding right outside. You have to sign a form saying you plan to take these illegal fireworks out of state to detonate them; astonishingly, these documents are ignored! We stopped at one of these models of modern capitalism today, to buy sparklers (legal). The clerk sat smoking under the “no smoking” sign, but she let us pet her pit bull puppy. Somehow, I think this says everything there is to say about it.

So happy Fourth of July! Set off some rockets’ red glare, or the terrorists have won!

This may be it for a few days, I fear. As my old pal Steve “Not that one” Austin used to say, I’m busier than a dawg with two …never mind. But until I return — let’s say, next Sunday/Monday — here’s something to page through if you like: “Detached,” a story in graphic form by James Burns, brother of my good friend J.C., among other key relationships. It’s not about web-slinging, but suffering a detached retina three weeks before you’re supposed to move from Indiana to Georgia.

Any comments? Leave them here or with James. I’m sure he’d like to hear them.

Me, I’ll see you on the backside of this busy busy week.

Spam comes in waves, I’ve noticed. OSX Mail gets most of the e-mailed stuff, but lots gets into the comments, and that’s a pain in the butt to handle, MT Blacklist or no. It’s all the usual stuff — penis enlargement, drugs by mail, hot babes just waiting for you to chat with them. Lately, I’ve noticed a spike in fake college degrees.

It’s a nuisance, but it isn’t. I’ve always thought of bottom-feeding advertising as an id of sorts. These folks know who their audience is and where they go, online and otherwise. Right-wing political magazines have — or used to have, anyway — lots of ads for increasing your vocabulary. There was a certain Charles Atlas sell job going on, a sort of “Tired of your college-educated liberal friends kicking sand in your face?” pitch that I always found endearing, sort of. It reminded me that the first time I heard Rush Limbaugh — and I’m talking about way before he was famous, when he was on something like five stations — I said, “This is a fat guy who cannot score with chicks.” And was I right?

I suppose fairness demands I note that left-wing publications have their own id-ads, mostly for products with guilt-free pedigrees and, of course, personal ads.

It’s been a cool June. Coolish, anyway. I find it delightful. There’s a perfect temperature that our house just loves, somewhere in the low 70s, when the windows can stand open all night long and the breeze blows through all the rooms. You can have your air conditioning — give me those nights when the air is filled with the happy sound of illegal fireworks exploding until midnight and beyond.

Heh. That’s my hood.

A few things:

Ron Reagan sounds insufferable, but an interesting sort of insufferable.

Every time I hear that journalists are elitists who are out of touch with the people, I think: Well, it’s not our salaries that make us that way. Gerald Ensley agrees.

I have a secret fantasy life, and it mostly involves food. Baking, to be specific. I have two dreams: 1) To make a buche de noel on Christmas Eve some year when I’m not running around like a crazy person; and 2) To make a wedding cake. Turns out my new friend Hank Stuever shares at least half this fantasy. Only he and his colleague Linda Perlstein actually did it. Eating it, too is their story of how it worked out. Long, but funny:

Things I never thought we would use to make a wedding cake, but did: a power saw, a metal sewing ruler, dental floss, a shish kebab skewer, a Sharpie marker, pantyhose.

Pantyhose! That must be the secret ingredient!

I have little to report today — you really don’t want to hear about Kate’s lemonade stand this weekend — but a few interesting things to recommend.

The NYT has a piece on a FW hometown boy who sits at the right hand — the far right hand — of Karl Rove. He used to write occasional op-ed pieces, too, but I haven’t seen any for a while. The one I remember most was his self-prescribed reading list for the year, every month given to an improving Great Work of Literature. The one I remember best was November, when, he announced, he would read “Ulysses” AND T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” My friend Dave the English professor quipped, “I think he’d better save that for a month with 31 days.”

Also, I didn’t see “Fahrenheit 9/11” this weekend and I guess I can wait for the video, but I saw enough of it in clip form to get the gist. I haven’t read a review yet that didn’t read like a blind-men-and-elephant thing, until I saw David Edelstein’s in Slate. I thought this simple observation was dead-on: “Fahrenheit 9/11” must be viewed in the context of the Iraq occupation and the torrent of misleading claims that got us there. It must be viewed in the context of Rush Limbaugh repeating the charge that Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster murdered in Fort Marcy Park, or laughing off the exposure of Valerie Plame when, had this been a Democratic administration, he’d be calling every day for the traitor’s head. It must be viewed in the context of Ann Coulter calling for the execution of people who disagree with her. It must be viewed in the context of another new documentary, the superb The Hunting of the President, that documents�irrefutably�the lengths to which the right went to destroy Bill Clinton. Moore might be a demagogue, but never�not even during Watergate�has a U.S. administration left itself so open to this kind of savaging.

Finally, newspapers are general-interest publications, and hardly anyone is a true general-interest reader, so there’s always stuff you don’t read. For me, for most newspapers, it’s most of the sports section (OK, all of it), Omar Sharif’s bridge column, the club listings and a few more items. I pride myself on being generally curious about the world, but hey — life is short.

So you can see my frame of mind when I started this L.A. Times column earlier this week. It began:

It was our housekeeper who first spotted the tiny grains of what looked like black sand in the corner of our kitchen floor.

I have a 1,200-bottle cellar next to our laundry room…

That’s where I stopped. Life, short, etc. (Pause.) OK, I skimmed the rest — a detailed description of how you can protect your wine cellar while your house is being tented and treated for termites.

Ohhh-kay, then. More tomorrow, I think. Probably.

I have to admit it: I feel a little guilty about making fun of Clinton’s book, because … well, because I didn’t read the book. In that, I’m like most of the people making fun of it now, frankly. Sorry, Michiko Kakutani may be a New York Times book critic, but I don’t believe she had time to plow through all 957 pages before panning it so viciously. Neither did the approximately 956 other pundits getting a quick 650 words out of it before they started their summer vacations.

That’s the dirty secret of modern life: It moves so fast you just have to fake it. Not sometimes, most of the time. When you’re a pundit, you have to do your faking in public.

No wonder the public hates us.

OK, that’s enough of that. Talker of the day: Indiana gets a bunch of money in settlement of a suit involving CD pricing, so they spend it on CDs for public libraries. But what happens next? The Indiana attorney general steps in and decides Meredith Brooks (remember her?) is too hot for the state to spend money on it. This album is, anyway. Must be that “Bitch” song.

Saints preserve us.

No, I’m wrong. This was the talker of the day:

An assistant manager at Champs Sports in the Oakdale Mall sprayed a flammable substance on a spider and then set it alight Wednesday, causing a blaze that evacuated the mall, village police and fire officials said.

That’s a link worth following, if only to see the pictures. I actually feel sorry for the dope. Like lots of disasters, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time. As Jeff Foxworthy might say, “Hey everybody, watch this.”

Personally, I give spiders amnesty. They kill flies and other nuisance bugs, and any that give me a problem are captured humanely and escorted to the property line.

Busy, busy weekend ahead. I doubt I’ll be back before Sunday. But you folks have yourselves a good weekend.