And now begins the countdown to Iceland, and a time of Some Uncertainty for blog postings. I’ll be on vacation, but of course I’ll also want to share the experience with you guys, because that’s what I do — share and overshare. However, the only computer I’m taking will be my phone, and for a long time, the WordPress mobile app didn’t play well with this site. Remember how I used to do Saturday-morning market posts, and then I stopped? That’s because I couldn’t seem to size the photos anymore — they downloaded in their full, multi-pixel splendor, sprawling all over the damn page and grr.

But I tried a phone post yesterday, and huzzah, it worked on three different devices, so awRIGHT, I can blog a bit from Scandinavia, at least as long as I have wifi.

I will not be attempting the Icelandic keyboard set, though, so apologies in advance for mangled spellings of local place names. I’ll do my best.

So while I count down the days and tick the items off my to-do list, which involves a shit-ton of work-work along the way, and in a holiday-shortened week to boot, enjoy some stateside bloggage:

Oh, you should have seen Mark the Shark this weekend; he was en fuego on social media about Herr Trump, whose cotton-candy hairdo may go down in history along with Hitler’s mustache if he keeps this shit up:

“What happens is the judge, who happens to be, we believe, Mexican, which is great. I think that’s fine,” Mr. Trump said.

The “Mexican” judge was a law-school classmate of Mark’s, at the Indiana University law school. The “Mexican” judge is Gonzalo Curiel, and he was born in Indiana. Trump called him a “hater, a hater of Donald Trump” why? Because he refused to grant summary judgment in Trump’s favor in one of the Trump University-is-a-scam trials. Any lawyer can tell you that summary judgments, while hardly unicorns, are sort of like 9-0 Supreme Court decisions in the modern era, i.e., kind of a rare bird. A summary judgment is the judge saying that a case is so weak or flawed we don’t even need to have a trial; it’s just game over and one side wins.

For not granting Trump his motion, Judge Curiel became the subject of a 12-minute speech-within-a-speech in San Diego — San-Di-frickin-ego, where you know that calling out a Hoosier “Mexican” isn’t going to attract any attention at all — that went to the usual places, the “build that wall” chant, all of it. My favorite part of the Wall Street Journal story:

An aide in Judge Curiel’s chambers on Friday said the judicial code of conduct prevents him from responding to Mr. Trump.

Well, I’m glad someone’s keeping their wits about them.

Of course, Rod Dreher read the same story and came away with a different villain: The protestors, because things got unruly, and oh that’s a very bad thing. I mean, they waved Mexican flags! OMG!!!

The hell with that. If you don’t protest some things, the people who perpetrate them think it’s OK. It’s not OK. Even if you can’t make them stop, you still speak up and say it’s wrong.

On a happier note, I know many of us here are fans of Pete Souza, the White House photographer whose images of the Obama presidency have been so wonderful. Here’s a puff piece on him, but includes a few of those great pictures. Something I didn’t know: Souza was also Ronald Reagan’s personal shooter, for six years.

Finally, let’s end with comedy: The Libertarian convention, held over the weekend in Orlando. Here’s your nominee, freedom lovers!

In Saturday night’s debate, Johnson, alone among the top-five contenders, said that he would have signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and that he thought people should be licensed to drive cars. He was loudly booed for both positions.

And here’s how it ended. With a fat guy spontaneously stripping off his clothes onstage.

OK, then! I leave you with a picture of my weekend, which was hot but also pretty delightful, as you can imagine:

So I stayed up late last night to finish one thing, and today got a reprieve – pushed back a week. Ah, well. Got my workout in late afternoon and just rolled with this particular non-punch. It’s almost a long weekend. Just enjoy it.

And it’s Movement weekend, i.e., the electronic-music festival that happens here every Memorial Day weekend. I told one of my nightowl friends I would attend the Movement afterparty of his choice. One option starts at 5 a.m., the other at 4:20 a.m. (ha ha). I intend to go to bed at 10, sleep a few hours, then rise at 3 to join the drugged-out masses at whatever sunrise show we end up at. I’m too old to stay up until 5 a.m. unless I have food poisoning or something.

I think stimulant drugs are coming back in a big way. Who the hell can stay up that late without them?

So I have to go to bed early tonight. Let’s keep this easy.

I’m not much for cat videos, but this is a great cat video.

We may have discussed the Jonathan Weisman case a while ago — can’t recall, too lazy to search. but it was egregious enough to prompt a piece coming this Sunday, and god, it’s so ugly. Key phrase, after explaining the blizzard of anti-Semitic shit that dropped on his head after daring to tweet an anti-Trump op-ed:

And still, we have heard nothing from Mr. Trump, no denunciation, no broad renouncing of racist, anti-Semitic support, no expressions of sympathy for its victims. The Republican Jewish Coalition on Tuesday released what can only be described as equivocation as an art form: “We abhor any abuse of journalists, commentators and writers, whether it be from Sanders, Clinton or Trump supporters. There is no room for any of this in any campaign.”

Sheldon Adelson, perhaps the most prolific Jewish donor to Republican causes, has not only endorsed Mr. Trump but is also encouraging Jews to rally round him.

Unbelievable. And Trump has a Jewish-convert daughter.

OK, sorry for the thin content this week, but I’m working hard and exhausted. And now we’re at the real beginning of summer. Huzzah. It’s been a long time coming.

I’m crashing to get a story done, after which I have to nose-grindstone it on the next one, so some more shortness of shrift today. Fortunately, some of you will have already read this, the New Yorker piece on the tender nature of the aggrieved students at the nation’s liberal arts colleges. In fact, it’s about the students at one liberal arts college – Oberlin.

You might remember the Derringers toured Oberlin, and Kate applied, and was admitted, but opted to become a Wolverine instead. After reading this, all I can say is: Whew.

But I don’t want to come down too hard on these kids. It’s easy to forget how high emotions can run when you’re 19 or 20 years old; most of us channel it into relations with our love interests, but many don’t. It’s also easy to forget that, at its basic level, complaints about micro aggressions and political correctness is essentially one person telling another not to be an asshole. (Seriously, when someone tells you they’re “not politically correct,” what do you immediately assume? That the person is an asshole. And aren’t you almost always right? Thought so.)

Even with those caveats, though, I think these kids are nuts, one literally so. But if nothing else, it should make you feel good about your community-college, or some other less impressive school, graduate. Because those kids are going to wipe the floor with these kids, the Oberlin kids.

Beyond that, I don’t have much. Lively conversations in comments yesterday, for which I thank you all. Someday we’ll all get together for a big party, maybe in the next world. But it’ll be fun.

Back to the grind.

And the title says it all, today. We had to get our pictures taken today for various company purposes, and I thought I might wear a dress that was sort of last season. With stockings (which, I don’t care what anyone says, are Still a Thing). I left in early afternoon, fairly gasping for air. Well over 80 degrees. Wendy is no longer a lapdog, the birdies wake me up in the predawn gloom, and here we are. Summer.

What we’ve all been waiting for.

Complaints about the heat and humidity begin in three, two, one…

But first, some bloggage!

I know most of you have probably already seen this, but it took me back. What my mother sees in Hillary – The author describes what it was like for her mother, widowed young, to make her way in the world without a man, in the 1970s, when the modern women’s movement was just getting rolling. It wasn’t always pretty:

Political decisions and opinions are personal and emotional — maybe more so than they are ever practical. Our identities are tied up in our choice of candidate in any given election cycle. This person represents me. It’s never been a question that Mrs. Clinton would be my chosen candidate. For me, it’s not just that she’s a woman who fights for women. It’s her giant heap of experience in governing — a heap so much higher than any other candidate’s.

And yes, I also love that she is always the last woman standing. She has survived ceaseless attacks. It must get very tiring, and yet she never flags. She has been called a bitch and a witch and characterized as Lady Macbeth. She’s shrill, she shouts, she barks. She’s uninspiring, she’s unlikable and she’s not exciting the base. Sometimes I think that many people in this country are still scared to see a powerful woman. But I am more ready for her than ever.

In the years when my mom was a single mother, people commented on her lifestyle with alarming frequency. Why wasn’t she living with her parents, they wanted to know. Wasn’t she worried that if she didn’t marry again soon, her son would grow up to be gay? Her landlord came over after her husband died, hemming and hawing, saying how sorry she was, but also that she was hoping my mom might move out to be closer to family, which would probably be better for everyone.

Well. My mother persevered. She smiled politely and bit her tongue and did what she had to do to survive those rough years.

I’d forgotten the endless Lifestyle section articles on how a single woman might get her own credit cards (!!!), take out a loan, deal with a handsy boss. It wasn’t that long ago. Ready for Hillary, indeed.

Speaking of the ’70s, you remember when the microwave oven was a miracle, when suddenly there were different types of lettuce in the markets, and then that lettuce started coming pre-torn and already washed, and now it’s so easy to buy organic baby greens? I can’t remember the last time I had to put a bunch of spinach through three washes to get the grit out of it – no, wait, I do, I think it was last summer – and chard and kale in their infant form are as easy to buy as peanut butter.

So now comes the pre-sliced apple. And it’s working:

Three years ago, a group of researchers at Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab had a hunch. They knew that many of apples being served to kids as part of the National School Lunch Program were ending up in the trash, virtually untouched. But unlike others, they wondered if the reason was more complicated than simply that the kids didn’t want the fruit.

Specifically, they thought the fact that the apples were being served whole, rather than sliced, was doing the fruits no favor. And they were on to something.

A pilot study conducted at eight schools found that fruit consumption jumped by more than 60 percent when apples were served sliced. And a follow-up study, conducted at six other schools, not only confirmed the finding, but further strengthened it: Both overall apple consumption and the percentage of students who ate more than half of the apple that was served to them were more than 70 percent higher at schools that served sliced apples.

This may be good news, it may be bad. But I guess it’s good enough. The heirloom varieties I favor in the fall don’t take well to pre-slicing; the Northern Spies I buy for pie start turning brown almost immediately. It doesn’t affect their taste, but it would affect a picky child’s appetite. But if they’re eating apples, it’s better than not eating apples.

Finally, I loved this. So proud of my old buddy Mark the Shark:

Things have gotten a bit testy between several members of the Fort Wayne Community Schools board and the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.

Last week the foundation sent a new report extolling the virtues of vouchers via email to Mark GiaQuinta, president of the Fort Wayne Community Schools board.

He responded with “more distortions and lies.”

That’s when Jennifer Wagner got involved – a well-known Democrat who has bucked her party’s stand against the state-paid vouchers that largely go to religious-based private schools.

She is now the Vice President of Communications for Friedman, and responded “Hi, Mark. Thanks for the thoughtful and constructive feedback on an issue that’s very important to the roughly 4,700 Fort Wayne families who are using Indiana’s voucher program.”

GiaQuinta didn’t hold back in his response to Wagner – saying ” it is very important to those desiring a religious education at taxpayer expense. You know it and I know it. Fewer than 10 percent of the recipients ever attended a public school. Congratulations for taking funds to educate the poor. You people are despicable.”

Despicable! He never holds back. And he’s so, so right about this.

Reading that today prompted me to surf over to the alma mater and see if they’re still putting out the laziest, most boring, recycled-crap editorial page in the Hoosier state and probably several others, and yes, yes they are. This sinecure-holder farts out another trombone solo, and as for Leo, well, it’s the usual regurgitated-from-blogworld stuff, the “apology tour,” Michelle Obama’s “obsession” with our eating habits, etc. Sad. But not really surprising.

Bedtime for me, and I need my beauty sleep today.

We’ve been having a little problem with the water here in Michigan; maybe you’ve heard.

When the Flint story began to break big, I asked Alan to check our water service line, and he did, reporting back: Lead. OK, no need to panic. The whole country is full of lead or lead-welded infrastructure, and it’s not necessarily an E-ticket to brain damage. When the dangers of lead were first grasped, we didn’t instantly dig them all up, we started adding anti-corrosive agents to municipal water systems. Over time — this is among the 10,000 fun facts about water treatment that every state resident has learned in the last six months or so — this builds up a layer of protective coating on your pipes, so no more lead leaching into your water.

(In fact, one of the problems with Flint now is, the residents are so leery of running their water for any reason that even though the city is now buying treated, finished water from Detroit again, they aren’t running enough through their home pipes to allow them to heal, so to speak. But I digress.)

So, theoretically, because we’ve been drinking treated water from Detroit since we’ve lived here, we should be fine. I didn’t rush to have our water tested, figuring the labs would be inundated with samples from Flint, where they legitimately have reason for concern. I didn’t want to take up lab time because I feel nervous.

Then elevated lead levels were found in a few isolated spots in the local public schools, and I overheard one of the janitors talking to the lifeguard at the pool, saying, “Well, what did they expect? They took the samples at the end of Easter vacation. That water had been sitting in the pipes for days.” Personally? What I expect would be no or hardly any lead in my water. So that was worrisome. And as more emails are released from various government entities, a culture of gaming the testing samples is becoming evident; there’s a protocol that allows outlier readings to be thrown out, or averaged, or something, so that the reaction when a bad sample turns up isn’t oh no lead rush to fix it, but quick get a bunch more samples, so we can throw that one out.

Enough time has passed that the Flint samples must have eased off at the state lab; time for Nance’s peace of mind. It’ll cost $26, assuming I filled out the form properly – it seems very to-the-trade, and how do you like that tiny envelope?

I’ll keep you posted on the extent of our brain damage.

What a weekend. Spring is here, and we set off for the local Junior League’s Decorator Show House. It was our family doctor’s father’s house, who I gather was something of an eccentric (when he got tired of keeping up the landscaping, he brought in goats, and ignored all official attempts to evict them), and a pack rat. After his death, the family spent months just clearing the place out. Late one New Year’s Eve, we got a text message inviting us there for one final, impromptu throwdown, and we went. It’s a spectacular house, and even with its ’70s shag carpet and years of neglect, it was clear the good bones were still there. Paul, our doctor, showed us the secret room where the booze was hidden during Prohibition (you could see the bottle marks on the floor), and the basement dry dock — yes, it has a canal leading to a boathouse that can be pumped out and boats hoisted for storage and repair, a feature that I’m sure got its share of action during the ’20s, too.

Every lakefront house in Grosse Pointe has some sort of Prohibition story attached to it, many of them b.s., but this is one whose stories I believe.

Anyway, the decorating was uneven, as most show houses are, but there were a lot of nice touches. The best were the ones where they let those good bones show through. Some moneybags will own it now, and it will nevermore host goats, I imagine. How often do you visit a house with its own lock, and not the kind on the doors?

So, then, a bit of bloggage?

Neil Steinberg with another Trump rant:

Have you looked at his face? The strain. The white circles around the eyes. He just doesn’t look like a well man. Yes, his keeling over dead sometime in the next six months would be a deus ex machina solution. But God looks kindly upon America. Or did.

Not to get overly personal and mean, which smacks of Trumpism. I don’t wish the man dead, just not living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The toughest challenge, facing him, is not to become like him. Because we lose that game, since he’s better at being him than we are.

“When fighting monsters,” as my favorite Nietszche quote goes, “take care not to become a monster.”

A daffy fashion piece by Robin Givhan, about Elizabeth Warren’s sleeves. Headline: Elizabeth Warren is sending you a subliminal message with her sleeves. For real.

The week ahead will be a bear, but I think I’m ready. I better be. You too?

A mixed bag today, as the week lumbers to a close. It was a fairly productive one; can’t complain, even though I was a no-show yesterday. Just one of those days, when nothing much went well and I ended it thinking all I wanted from life was a little Netflix and a book. The next thing you know, you look up and there’s been a plane crash, Morley Safer checks out and…it’s Thursday night.

Happy Friday.

So let’s start with the best bloggage of the bunch. We were talking a few weeks back about the various eagle cams and falcon cams and all the rest of the cams that show us avian predator life in its cuddly fledgling stage. A great piece follows, from the WashPost, about the nest-cam operators who are shutting down, because the thousands watching online? Can’t handle the truth:

The osprey cam at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is trained on a nest near the Massachusetts seaside, and the pair that call it home are now waiting for three eggs to hatch. But for the first spring in a decade, the camera is dark, and a note on the institute’s website offers only a two-sentence explanation.

“Regrettably, the cam will not be operating this season due to the increasingly aggressive actions of certain viewers the last two years,” it begins.

That is a staid reference to cam fans whose emotions about the nest morphed into vitriol — and fighting words. When the osprey mother began neglecting and attacking her chicks in 2014, anxiety exploded among some viewers, as did demands that the institution intervene to save the baby birds. When the same thing happened in 2015, the public passions took a more personal turn.

“It is absolutely disgusting that you will not take those chicks away from that demented witch of a parent!!!!!” one viewer emailed to Jeffrey Brodeur, the communications specialist who ran the camera. Another wrote: “I realize this is nature, but once you put up a cam to view into their worlds it is no longer nature. You have a responsibility to help n save when in need.”

It’s a great story — lots of anecdotes about people who are way too over-invested in the world that flies around over our heads. How much so? Oh, you have no idea:

In 2014, when the chicks featured on a bald-eagle cam in North Fort Myers, Fla., weren’t getting much to eat, some viewers decided to take matters into their own hands. Under cover of darkness, they headed to the nest site and tossed meat into it — a roast, to be specific.

I love the eagle cams as much as the next person, but when things get a little dicey, I just click away. That’s why we have Donald Trump – for the distraction.

Speaking of which.

The WP also has a pretty good piece about the next generation of Trumps, specifically his sons, Eric and Don.

It’s pretty good, but Hank Stuever started an interesting Facebook conversation about the difference between the Trump scions, who at least talked to the Washington Post, and Chelsea Clinton, who apparently still thinks it’s 1993 and she’s 13 years old, protected like the tender bud she was then. Now it’s 2016 and she’s 36, and she still doesn’t answer a question that wasn’t vetted, but feels she can campaign for her mother and face only the scrutiny she approves. So, then: Props to the young Trumps, who I liked better after reading this. Dammit.

Can we trust the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education? Because these numbers are crazy:

If 10 percent of American smokers gave up cigarettes and the rest cut back by 10 percent, the U.S. could shave $63 billion off medical costs the next year, the analysis found.

It doesn’t pass the smell test, but I have no idea it’s a big number. But is it that big?

The new study found that regions with lower smoking rates had substantially lower medical costs from 1992 through 2009.

Californians spent $15.4 billion less on healthcare in 2009 than they would have if they smoked as much as the national average, the analysis estimates. At the other extreme, Kentucky residents spent an estimated $1.7 billion more than the national average on healthcare because they smoked more.

Maybe.

Here’s a nice Neal Rubin column from Detroit, about the breakup of a chain of sleazebags ripping off Detroit Public Schools. I don’t want to excerpt anything from it, but read it — it’s good.

Finally, Lisa Belkin, the former NYT reporter and author “Show Me a Hero,” wrote a piece about the time when, as a young reporter, Donald Trump made a pass at her. It attracted this fan mail:

Sorry for the language, but this is the sort of thing women who write on the internet get used to. Enjoy your weekend. May you get no communiques like that.

I checked my email before leaving for the pool this morning, and learned that a filter at the pool had gone out, a part was needed and hadn’t been located yet and the pool would be closed for the rest of the school year. But the district wasn’t leaving us out to dry — ha! — but was relocating the sunrise swim to one of the high-school natatoriums. Which is only a few years old and several orders of magnitude nicer than the middle-school pool we use now.

So hey, I rolled up, parked, found the locker room and got wet. It was delightful, the keepers of this pool adhering to the more modern idea that the water should be on the cool side. And there was an extractor in the locker room, as well as, what’s this? Private showers? With curtains?

Yes, it appears the gang shower of yesteryear, the stage for Carrie’s disgrace and probably yours in some forgotten nightmare, is a thing of the past, at least here. Which immediately made me think that, once again, all the fretting about locker rooms is probably just more wasted worry.

And! There was an extractor for swimsuits! The rest of this year’s pool time is going to be 100 percent win.

(This opinion wasn’t shared by all, I should add. Two women confessed they felt freaked out by the vastness of the diving well, and the fact the shallow end of the lanes was nearly 7 feet deep. Neither will be going to the Olympics, I guess.)

I was called upon to do a late work chore this evening, which cut into my blogging time. In lieu of links, accept this photo of Saturday’s appetizer. Salmon tartare. So much yum.

And happy Wednesday.

As I think I’ve mentioned a time or ten, my link-wrangling on a day-to-day basis goes like this: When I find something interesting, I toss it into a draft post, a process that goes on all day, between other things.

I think it was the third item when I found they had a common theme today:

Honestly, though, the kickoff item is almost joyful. And it so happens that one of my Facebook friends was there when it happened: Bassist Jane Little, who only recently became the longest-serving orchestra musician in the world, collapsed on stage during a performance of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Sunday. She never regained consciousness, and died later that night. At 87, after 71 years with the ensemble.

Which would merely be sad, but not when you consider what they were playing at the moment she went down: “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” Which was their encore, in fact. And as one of her fellow players scooped her up and carried her offstage, they kept playing, so she actually left the limelight as the song reached a climax: So let’s go on with the show! A WashPost account of the incident, and her life, here.

A friend once told me he despised the platitude we so often say after someone dies: “Well, at least he died doing something he loved,” because most people don’t want to die, much less screaming toward the earth at 32 feet per second when a parachute malfunctions. In this case, though, I think we can make an exception. You couldn’t have scripted a better death; in fact, if you had scripted this, the director would have thrown it back in your face and called you Mr. Obvious.

Then, mid afternoon, I checked Twitter and found this:

Seeing an owl hunt at night in this Israeli webcam is *chilling* https://t.co/9z1DdO0sxg The eyes. Those eyes… pic.twitter.com/N2Tol5cXsS

— Kyle Hill (@Sci_Phile) May 16, 2016

Once you find the eyes, it’s just mesmerizing.

And on an animal theme, there are these outdoorsmen:

The weather at Yellowstone National Park on May 9 was fairly temperate: The low was 39 degrees Fahrenheit; the high was 50.

Nevertheless, when two tourists saw a baby bison, they decided it looked cold and needed to be rescued. So they loaded it in the trunk of their car and drove it to a ranger station.

Over the weekend, their action was widely mocked online as evidence of extreme anthropomorphism, not to mention stupidity. On Monday, the park revealed that it was also deadly — for the bison. The newborn calf had to be euthanized, the park said in a statement, because its mother had rejected it as a result of the “interference by people.”

My eyeballs just sprained themselves, they rolled so hard.

Finally, an astounding long-form project from the NYT, on the city’s century-old potters field on Hart Island. It’s very long, and I haven’t gotten all the way through it, but what I’ve seen is remarkable: Deep history, a slow burn of anger over the policy that dumps so many people in mass graves there, impressive enterprise (when the city wouldn’t let the media observe or photograph an interment, they hired a drone). And great writing:

New York is unique among American cities in the way it disposes of the dead it considers unclaimed: interment on a lonely island, off-limits to the public, by a crew of inmates. Buried by the score in wide, deep pits, the Hart Island dead seem to vanish — and so does any explanation for how they came to be there.

To reclaim their stories from erasure is to confront the unnoticed heartbreak inherent in a great metropolis, in the striving and missed chances of so many lives gone by. Bad childhoods, bad choices or just bad luck — the chronic calamities of the human condition figure in many of these narratives. Here are the harshest consequences of mental illness, addiction or families scattered or distracted by their own misfortunes.

But if Hart Island hides individual tragedies, it also obscures systemic failings, ones that stack the odds against people too poor, too old or too isolated to defend themselves. In the face of an end-of-life industry that can drain the resources of the most prudent, these people are especially vulnerable.

Indeed, this graveyard of last resort hides wrongdoing by some of the very individuals and institutions charged with protecting New Yorkers, including court-appointed guardians and nursing homes. And at a time when many still fear a potter’s field as the ultimate indignity, the secrecy that shrouds Hart Island’s dead also veils the city’s haphazard treatment of their remains.

The best single detail is about the AIDS row: Buried 14 feet deep, instead of the usual three. Just 16 bodies, but it brings back an era in a way few other memories do.

Have I bummed you out enough yet? Just think of Jane Little. On with the show!

This past weekend, the Nall-Derringer co-prosperity sphere marked 23 years of legal partnership, with an expensive meal at one-a them fancy places opening up all over the damn place. It was pricey, but I wore a secondhand dress I got on a Facebook swap site for $5, so it all balanced out. And we did order the tasting menu, which is never cheap. Ah well, special occasion and all, and there’s a jar of peanut butter in the pantry that will get us through the next few days. Plus, I never would have tried ivory salmon without it, so there’s also that.

The event in progress:

When you’ve been married 23 years, you may find the other people in the restaurant more interesting than the person across the table. So it was with me and that couple behind us; “I’m listening, dear” expression was on his face every time I looked his way. As for her, great barrel curls.

The night before we did a quick hop down to Fort Wayne, to watch Kate’s band kick off their summer tour in front of a hometown assembly, check out the reno progress on Alex’ house and just generally get away from it all. It’s always strange to go back to a place you once knew but don’t quite so much anymore. Calhoun Street was both the same and different, downtown looked like it had recently had an oxygen hit, but the north side between downtown and Coliseum Boulevard was pretty sad. Not Detroit-sad, but faded and tired and neglected. Up near Alex’ house, though? Boomtown. I know, I know — FREEDOM and FREE ENTERPRISE and all that, but it’s so, so wrong to let your city grow holes like this. Here’s hoping the coalescing of millennials and retiring boomers make the move-back-in trend into something sustainable, because all those beige subdivisions where farm fields used to be is a terrible mistake.

Let’s look at the soup course from Saturday, take our minds off our troubles a bit, eh?

That’s an asparagus-spinach soup, and all the drizzles and swirlies and so on are pretty much forgotten to me now. But it was tasty.

In between all the visiting and sight-seeing, we had dinner with Mark the Shark, who’s on the school board, and let me tell you, this voucher program the Indiana legislature pushed through in the name of FREEDOM and CHOICE? Worst idea ever. Why hasn’t anyone sued over this? I’d be livid at the thought of my tax money being redistributed to every religious grifter in the state, and taken away from my local public district. We have school-funding difficulties in Michigan, too, but this is next-level.

I cleaned and frolicked this weekend, and have little bloggage because I barely glanced at the papers. But there’s this, the Donald Trump-and-women piece everyone’s talking about:

What emerges from the interviews is a complex, at times contradictory portrait of a wealthy, well-known and provocative man and the women around him, one that defies simple categorization. Some women found him gracious and encouraging. He promoted several to the loftiest heights of his company, a daring move for a major real estate developer at the time.

He simultaneously nurtured women’s careers and mocked their physical appearance. “You like your candy,” he told an overweight female executive who oversaw the construction of his headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. He could be lewd one moment and gentlemanly the next.

It’s a much better piece than I expected.

Now time for “Game of Thrones” and the week ahead.

Bernie is coming in for a lot of abuse in these parts, and I don’t disagree with most of it, but he’s on to something when he offers young people free college. I think he has it wrong, though.

We all know college, or some form of post-secondary education, is almost certainly the necessary credential for a middle-class station in life. But college the way many of us experienced it — four years, consecutively, at one school, with either the full or partial support of our parents — is swiftly becoming a thing of the past.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve written a couple of times about so-called early college or middle college programs. They’ve got a little toehold in Michigan, mostly with kids considered at-risk, though lord knows why. It’s a great idea: Instead of four years of high school, you go for five, and graduate at 19 with a high-school diploma and either an associate’s degree, a technical certification or up to I-can’t-remember-how-many college credits, that will transfer to a four-year institution.

The one I wrote about in Flint is pretty typical — it’s connected to a community college, and students move back and forth between the high school and college buildings freely. I came away thinking of it as high school minus the bullsh–, errr, those little extras that make it so. Few or no extracurriculars. No sports, no music (although students could play sports at their “home” schools, or participate in music via the college classes and ensembles. But no prom, no pep assemblies, none of the stuff we make movies about. Kids enter in 10th grade and are sort of eased into higher ed; it’s like a splint between the two worlds, and one reason I think “at-risk” kids tend to respond well to it is, they’re treated like adults, and they like that.

And it’s all free, paid for by the state’s per-pupil allowance.

If this is what Bernie means by free college, then bring on the free college. I wonder how many years we’ll have to wander in the wilderness before a generation or two rinses away the rose-colored hindsight about the best years of our lives, etc.

And, of course, we’ll have to build a lot more facilities attached to higher-ed institutions. Which will cost money. So of course it will never happen.

In other news at this hour, I read this excerpt from Frances Stroh’s memoir — or “debut memoir,” as the editor’s note says, which makes me wonder how many more may be coming — today. It’s called “Beer Money,” and of course you know which beer we’re talking about here. Fire-brewed Stroh’s, once proudly made in Detroit, now just one of those brands you cringe to remember. But when it was big, it was very very big, until the family succumbed to Kennedy Syndrome and drank and frittered it all away.

Hence the memoir.

It’s not bad at all; she’s a good writer, if a little on-the-nose about touching all the Grosse Pointe rich family bases: Indifferent to food, check. Topsiders without socks, check. Mother with freckled calves, check. Family in sprawling, icy house, check. And so on. But this part brought me up a little short:

I turned the car around by the yacht club and started heading back. The lights of Windsor were just coming on across the lake: Canada — our unlikely neighbor.

Never mind why it’s unlikely that Canada is next door; where else would it be? The problem is, you can’t see Windsor from the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club. It’s just all lake when you look out from there, maybe some blobby forms way out there on the clearest day, but not close enough to see the lights coming on.

This sort of thing drives me nuts. I know it’s poetic license and all, but it still does.

I’d like to pin down someone who writes regularly about a real place — Laura Lippman, maybe, or one of her confederates — about when you can invent streets and geography. It always takes me out of a story. One of Elmore Leonard’s kids writes novels (not well) and at in one had a couple “skidding to a stop in the gravel” alongside I-94 in Detroit. There is no gravel alongside I-94. It’s an urban freeway, not a fucking goat trail.

OK, enough bitching for now. No links today, and besides, you guys always have better ones.