Every year you hear fireworks horror stories. They’re still coming in, but I doubt any will top this one:

Residents at the party began shooting off fireworks in the street — which is illegal — when someone accidentally knocked over an explosive that was supposed to shoot skyward.

Instead of going up, the explosive launched sideways into a party-goer’s 2005 Ford Escape with the hatchback open and right into an arsenal of fireworks in the trunk estimated to be worth between $2,000 and $3,000, according to police.

That set off all of the fireworks inside of the vehicle, setting the car on fire, and shot a large mortar at the house across the street, crashing through the front window.

This is the fruit of a relaxed fireworks law that passed a few years back. Although I must admit, it might have been fun to see that.

So the week is underway — hot weather, storms on the way, followed by storms and cooler. The narrative of the summer. Spent the first day of the week in Ann Arbor, the office mostly deserted, the chickadees singing in the trees. Not a bad Monday.

Some bloggage:

Nighty-night, Bill Cosby. These quaaludes will help you sleep. Deadpan is digging up the documents, and it’s every bit as squicky as you’d expect:

(The alleged victim, the plaintiff) didn’t ask for any money—only an apology—but Cosby still offered her money, according to his testimony, for her “education.” He also offered money to another woman. From the same plaintiff’s motion (emphasis added is mine):

Defendant testified that even though both Plaintiff and her mother told him that all they wanted was an apology, he called Plaintiff’s home and spoke to her mother to offer money for Plaintiff’s “education.” The following occurred during questioning about that event:

Q. So, are you saying that Andrea would have to prove to you that she got a 3.0 average wherever she went in order for you to pay for her education?

A. She would have to prove to me that while she was at said university that she was maintaining a 3.0.

Now there’s a conscience laundry, eh?

“True Detective” fans might enjoy this take on the obvious model for fictional Vinci, California — Vernon, California. A bad place.

I wish I had more, but alas. Let’s try for better tomorrow.

I think everything you need to know about my 40th high school reunion last weekend can be summed up in this scene from its final moments, when I was invited to judge the quality of my oldest friend’s boob job with a friendly squeeze.

Also, this: The boob job was a restoration following a double mastectomy, which itself followed a second bout of the big C in a decade. Because of the previous treatment, the restoration was no simple matter, requiring skin stretchers and all sorts of gruesome-sounding shit. But my friend, Cindy, and her husband Mark, are amazingly upbeat about it all. I think the reason I was invited to handle the goods was because, she said, they didn’t really feel like breasts anymore, with all their sensitivity and tingliness, which I guess stands to reason.

Reader, I cannot deny it: I honked the horns. They felt fine.

“Now all we have to do is shop for nipples!” Mark reported. Evidently that’s the final step.

So that’s life in the late 50s, I guess: Boob jobs, but not for the typical reasons. Grandchildren. Older but wiser. There was a memorial video for the ones who are permanently off the mailing list, so to speak. One word: AIDS. A little more kindness all around. The head cheerleader, apparently the only member of the class with a child younger than mine, explained the circumstances of his debut — 40s, no man on the horizon, sperm bank. A guy I’d always assumed was a drug casualty was finally revealed as an obvious psychiatric case. The funny pot dealers were there, still funny, still probably holding. (I didn’t ask.) At least one pill refused to wear the event T-shirt because the theme was “Forty Shades of Gray” and wearing that on your chest would be counter to God’s law. If he’d said, “Because God disapproves of lousy fiction,” I could get behind that, but I don’t think that’s what he meant.

My class reunites every five years, which always struck me as way too often. It was also a group of nearly 800 souls, which is way too big. You’re lucky to have known a quarter of them, and if 10 percent of them show up at a reunion, you’re lucky. I went to the five, 10, 15, 20 and 25-year events, and said after the last one that I was done forever. So did Cindy; she said that after battling cancer she was in no mood to waste time with vague acquaintances. But this year they roped her onto the committee, and she roped me into going.

Another thing that happened as I was making my way to the door, after the boob squeeze: I was drafted to work on the next committee. There’s a price for everything, I guess.

And that was most of my holiday weekend. How was yours? I’m writing this a few hours before leaving for a backyard barbecue. I was kind of thinking I’d see “Magic Mike XXL” today, but give it a few more days and another all-day rain will roll in, and that’ll be much better weather for it. Barbecue while you can, because you can’t do that via Netflix.

Not much bloggage today, but there’s this:

BASTROP, Texas — The office of the Bastrop County Republican Party is in an old lumber mill on Main Street, with peeling brown paint and a sign out front that captures the party’s feelings about the Obama administration: “WISE UP AMERICA!”

Inside, county Chairman Albert Ellison pulled out a yellow legal pad on which he had written page after page of reasons why many Texans distrust President Obama, including the fact that, “in the minds of some, he was raised by communists and mentored by terrorists.”

So it should come as no surprise, Ellison said, that as the U.S. military prepares to launch one of the largest training exercises in history later this month, many Bastrop residents might suspect a secret Obama plot to spy on them, confiscate their guns and ultimately establish martial law in one of America’s proudly free conservative states.

I wouldn’t live in Texas for all the money in the world.

Also this, Neil Sternberg’s valedictory for the open-outcry system at the Chicago Board of Trade, which I’m glad I got to see before it went away, because it was something to see.

And finally this, Frank Bruni’s backhand to the Kennedy spawn spreading vaccine alarmism:

If you had told me a while back that I’d someday dread, dodge and elect not to return phone calls from a prominent member of the Kennedy dynasty, I would have said you were nuts.

Then Robert Kennedy Jr. started reaching out.

Not just reaching out, mind you, but volunteering to educate me. To illuminate me. That was his tone of voice, somewhat pitying and vaguely patronizing, the one time we talked at length, after he’d left messages and before he left more.

Midsummer starts now.

I don’t want to belabor this gay marriage thing, but at the same time, it irritates me the way they squat over the whole narrative of what the institution even is. That’s why I liked this piece in the WashPost, which shows in graphic form how closely tied not to religion and culture, but demography and the economy.

I learned this when I wrote about marriage for Bridge a couple years ago: You want people to get married? Make them middle class in the first place. But in the absence of an economy that can accommodate them, it’s really difficult to convince poorer people that they’re better off married than single. (Even though, yes, some of them — some of them — would be. Might be.) So, you want people to get married? Tend to the economy first. The rest will follow.

Such good bloggage today. Sorry I’m a day late on this, but I really liked the column about Chris Christie that everyone’s talking about. It illustrates something I always tell my writing students (not that I have any at the moment): When the facts speak for themselves, let them.

Other lying politicians tend to waffle, to leave themselves some escape hatch. You can almost smell it.

But Christie lies with conviction. His hands don’t shake, and his eyes don’t wander. I can hardly blame the union leaders who met with him for believing him.

Such an elegantly simple accusation: He lies. And yet so uncommon in modern political reporting. No one wants to lose access. I guess the Star-Ledger editorial board doesn’t care anymore.

You may have heard about Ask Bobby, the Jindal campaign’s Twitter-chat effort. Why do politicians make this mistake over and over? They think they’ll get respectful questions, and they get this:

How does it feel to have done more damage to Louisiana than Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures did? #AskBobby

— HumidCity (@HumidCity) July 1, 2015

and this:

Given the current condition of Louisiana state finances under your admin, are you jealous of Greece? #askbobby

— Blue Gal/Fran (@bluegal) June 30, 2015

and this:

#AskBobby – @BobbyJindal Is the cognitive dissonance of having a biology degree and being viciously anti-science overwhelming?

— NonProphetess (@nonprophetess) June 30, 2015

It’s entertaining, anyway. Scroll away.

Stephen Colbert dropped in and out of metro Detroit, and left this behind. It’s brilliant. Watch.

Finally, there’s a hot new band playing in Detroit this weekend. They got some good ink today.

Almost the long weekend. Enjoy.

Well, here’s a headline you don’t see every day: Woman gives birth, fights off bees, starts wildfire in Northern California.

And yes, it’s exactly as delightful as you’d wish, although I’ll admit that the situation it describes couldn’t have been pleasant to endure. Still:

The bees wanted the placenta, she said with a chuckle.

Sort of gives new meaning to the phrase “mother and baby are doing fine.” They are, it’s just…it took some doing.

So, how was your day? Mine was eh. Half a day in Ann Arbor, lunch at a coney island, which is always restaurant choice No. 58 on a list of 60. (Nos. 59 and 60? Buffalo Wild Wings and Hardee’s.) But it was a group, and I was outvoted. I wanted bibimbap from the Korean place two doors down, but it was closed. I’m a late convert to bibimbap, and I’m glad I lived long enough to discover it, and now I have some catching up to do. Had a gyro, which I immediately regretted, even as I ate every delicious bite. I think gyro meat is one of those protein sources it’s best not to think too hard about. Fortunately, I only have one about once in a blue moon.

It’s been a cool summer so far, so much so that slipping into the heated pool at 6:45 a.m. today was a relief from the morning air. I bought dark goggles for those outdoor backstroke lengths staring up at the sun, but didn’t need them today — overcast. It’s what we do here in Michigan half the year, you’d think we could get a little break in the sunny season, but nooooooo. But I did my damn laps. I’m a fairly terrible swimmer, but my slow, plodding style is better than sleeping another hour. I puffed through a mile last Friday; it took 40 minutes.

I hope that would please the First Lady, who invited a bunch of Girl Scouts to have a campout on the White House lawn last night as part of the Let’s Move program. It looks like it went well:

POTUS says he doesn't know any campfire songs, learns one from the Girl Scouts: "Fantastic. That was outstanding" pic.twitter.com/tjRlU9UaVM

— David Shepardson (@davidshepardson) July 1, 2015

Did I ever tell you my best camping story? Probably. I’ll tell it again: On Alan’s and my first camping trip as a couple, we…well, we overpacked. But hey, no problem — we were car camping, so it’s just a matter of squeezing it all in. We went up to the Au Sable River over Memorial Day weekend, and it was crowded in the National Forest campground, but we took an extra day off at the end of the weekend, and by Monday night, it was as quiet and peaceful as you want the forest to be — no canoes on the river, no rednecks blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd around the campfire, nothing. On Tuesday, we carried all our crap back to the car, which was a distance from the site, around a bend in the path and entirely out of sight of the campsite and the river. As I picked up the cooler on the final trip, there were but two beers left, still cold in the melting ice. I took them out and put them on the picnic table and said, “Let’s load this stuff, come back, drink these last two Budweisers and hit the road.” Alan said it sounded like a plan, and we humped the last load to the car.

When we came back three minutes later, there were two wet rings where the beers had been. I looked up and down the river. Nothing. I looked up and down the path running alongside the river. Nothing. I listened for any sound other than the wind in the trees. Nothing. Someone must have come along, seen two ice-cold beers sitting on a picnic table with no one else in sight, looked up at the sky, whispered “thank you, God” and made off with them.

I hope, somewhere in Michigan that weekend, someone told a different version of that story.

OK, so the bloggage, then:

I hope Caitlyn Jenner is happy with how she looks now, but man, those are some positively Seinfeldian man-hands, and I agree with Tom & Lorenzo — she should go up a size.

Roy takes on the First Things (“Opus Dei stroke book”) symposium on same-sex marriage with a lot more humor and insight than I ever could muster.

Wednesday already? How the hell did that happen?

Before the rainbows fade or are pushed aside by the next news event coming down the pike, I have to spare a moment more for the people who are so unhinged by the SSM decision. I always ask, what do they want? And every so often one will answer, in so many words: For homosexuals (because it’s always “homosexuals,” never “gay” or “LGBT”) to just go away. Back into the closets, the bars, the bearded marriages, the three-martini cocktail hours and all the rest of it.

How can they not see it? The world never runs that way. Well, let them yearn.

All-lite bloggage today, because why not:

I’ve said before that Reductress is the Onion of women’s magazines, and here you go: This beautiful destination wedding really inconvenienced everyone.

Guests were told to come “dressed to impress,” looking sleek and sharp in their black tie attire at the base of the mountain, though many became noticeably fatigued and regretful of their footwear choices as they hiked up to the ceremony site.

“We miss her dearly,” says the groom now, looking at a framed picture of his grandmother. “But she died doing what she loved: watching me get married.”

One of the trainers at my gym got married at a five-star resort in the Dominican Republic. I’m sure it was a lovely ceremony.

Hey, e’ry body, watch this: The first fireworks casualty of the season. (OK, so not lite, but funny in a newspaper-y sort of way.

Martin Scorsese talks about “The Third Man,” one of my favorite movies.

Another damn basement hog in Detroit! (OK, Highland Park. Practically Detroit.) Three makes a trend, so I’m waiting.

Friday night is traditionally cocktails-with-friends night, and last week’s debrief took place at St. Cece’s, which used to be a bad Irish bar/restaurant and is now a much better one, not Irish anymore but with all the decor left mainly untouched.

Everyone was sitting outside, summer being short and this summer particularly so. We sat inside.

Of course, topic one was SCOTUS, followed immediately by the president’s eulogy in Charleston. I said there what I said in the comments Friday, that this is truly an extraordinary presidency, one I don’t expect to see again in my lifetime. If you missed the speech, I urge you to look it up online and watch it. First, you might find it helpful to read James Fallows’ analysis. That’s because the speech is so good you’re going to want to just let it wash over you, and knowing why it’s so good will help you appreciate it so much more:

Here are the three rhetorical aspects of the speech that I think made it more artful as a beginning-to-end composition than any of his other presentations:

— The choice of grace as the unifying theme, which by the standards of political speeches qualifies as a stroke of genius.

— The shifting registers in which Obama spoke—by which I mean “black” versus “white” modes of speech—and the accompanying deliberate shifts in shadings of the word we.

— The start-to-end framing of his remarks as religious, and explicitly Christian, and often African-American Christian, which allowed him to present political points in an unexpected way.

I’ve noticed something over the weekend; I’m not hearing much discussion of this from the usual suspects who bemoan the lack of religion in daily life. Rod Dreher, as previously noted, it having a nelly-ass meltdown over same-sex marriage, and the coming purge of Christians he is dead-set convinced is going to happen ANY MINUTE NOW. I won’t link to a specific post. You can just hit the home page and scroll.

Pretty much everyone, from right to left, is melting down in one way or another over SSM. It is a big, big moment in our history, a real arc-of-justice thing, so I totally understand. This was the other big topic at Friday cocktails, and for once, I don’t think I have to give you a linkage roundup, although I thought this column, by the Freep’s consistently excellent Brian Dickerson, was, yes, excellent. It’s about an estranged gay partner who had the misfortune to have her custody battle in recent years, when she was a legal non-entity in the lives of three children she helped raise for a decade. It’s moving and sad, and when you contrast her story with Dreher’s chicken-littling, it’s even more so.

(Oh, and I don’t know if you’ll get the same autoplaying ad on the autoplaying video that I did, but man, it’s fucking weird — a “Michigan Celebrates Marriage” campaign from the Catholic church, of all entities. Horrifying bad taste, considering the circumstances, if you ask me.)

The above got us through two rounds of drinks, and then someone checked Twitter, and it was all about the hog story, a real OID about a guy who died — not in his own house, but nearby, very OID — and a couple days later the cops get a call that there’s a live pig in the guy’s basement, who’s allegedly been surviving on human remains. That last part turned out to be b.s., but the pig was very real, a female living up to her hocks in her own shit. Poor piggy! And when the cops got there, it turned out the steps to the basement were missing, because of course they were. So there was a several hours-long situation, with neighbors gathering at the yellow tape line and everybody joking about barbecue.

We talked about dropping by, maybe with a six-pack or something, but then they somehow fashioned a ramp that the pig found agreeable, and she was free. She’s going to a shelter or sanctuary or something, and as long as she doesn’t have any serious medical conditions, she’ll be living out her days there. Thank god, because that pig earned her some retirement.

More happened over the weekend, but let’s save something for the rest of the week. Lord knows what it’ll be like. (The prison breakout story is already wrapping up.) Let’s hope for the best.

Coolish, cloudyish, sort of an -ish day. But a good one. I spent it in shorts and a T-shirt, watching the SCOTUS reaction and reading about sexual assault at the University of Michigan. Among other things. Stirring the noodles, planning the rest of the summer.

Reading stories I find infuriating:

Marquette has been hit hard by a tactic that the country’s biggest retailers are using to slash their property taxes. Known as the “dark store” method, it exemplifies the systematic way that these chains extract money from local governments. It’s also the latest example of the way that, even as local governments across the country continue to bend over backwards to attract and accommodate big-box development, these stores are consistently a terrible deal for the towns and cities where they locate.

Marquette is one of the countless places that has bought into big-box economic development. Over the years, the township in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan spent millions extending water mains, law enforcement, and other infrastructure and services to its big-box commercial corridor along U.S. 41. When the Lowe’s opened there in 2008, local officials including the mayor turned out for a “board-cutting” ceremony—the home improvement center version of a ribbon-cutting.

Then, less than two years later, Lowe’s flipped the script. The mega-retailer, which reports annual net sales of about $50 billion, went to tax court to appeal its property tax assessment. Marquette had pegged the taxable value of the store, which had just been built for $10 million, at $5.2 million. In front of the Michigan Tax Tribunal, an administrative court whose members are appointed by the state governor, Lowe’s won assessments that were, instead, $2.4 million in 2010, $2 million in 2011, and $1.5 million in 2012.

It goes on. It gets more infuriating. Read, because it’s probably happening where you are.

Reading stories that should be news, but aren’t anymore: The Romeo Observer, a weekly newspaper, is folding. Tragedy, right? I learned about this via the Facebook page of a Republican consultant I connected with when I wrote a different story. His take:

I have never rejoiced at the demise of a newspaper, until today. Good riddance to the flea-bitten Romeo Observer and its cranky luddite Editor and Publisher Melvin Bleich. In the article proclaiming its own demise, the Observer attributed its downfall to “the internet.” Bleich hated technology. He refused my press releases releases sent via fax, and then later by email. He once told me, in the most caustic possible way, that he would only accept press releases via the postal service or by hand. So, thank you internet for righteously claiming this most worthy of victims in your relentless drive to actually inform people in a timely fashion!

There are Luddites, and there are Luddites. Hilarious. We once had a stringer in Fort Wayne, a man in his 80s, who would send in his dispatches typed on onionskin paper, in envelopes with RUSH written on them in a shaky hand. On the other hand, when there was a propane explosion down in Berne, he got out of bed, pulled on his pants and dictated a few grafs to the desk on deadline. God bless Simon Schwartz, who I assume has gone to be with the God he believed in so fiercely. (After the propane explosion, in which some victims were burned, he wrote a chatty note to an editor speculating on whether their pain might be equal to the fires of hell.)

Bristol Palin is pregnant. No comment. (She doesn’t want any lectures.)

And so we lurch into the weekend. Happy weekend to you.

Who was it who first called the GOP presidential primary field a clown car? Could that be any more apt, what with the entrance today of Bobby Jindal, who announced today with…are you kidding me? A hidden-camera video of him telling his kids?

I’m all for modernity and all, but I’m also for taste of the good variety. I expect Louisiana’s in for it the way Wisconsin is:

Leaders of Mr. Walker’s party, which controls the Legislature, are balking at his demands for the state’s budget. Critics say the governor’s spending blueprint is aimed more at appealing to conservatives in early-voting states like Iowa than doing what is best for Wisconsin.

Lawmakers are stymied over how to pay for road and bridge repairs without raising taxes or fees, which Mr. Walker has ruled out.

The governor’s fellow Republicans rejected his proposal to borrow $1.3 billion for the roadwork, arguing that adding to the state’s debt is irresponsible.

“The governor rolled out $1.3 billion in bonding,” Scott Fitzgerald, the Senate majority leader, said in an interview. “It’s not been well received, is the best way to put it.”

Predictably, Charles Pierce is no fan, but also predictably, he’s smart/entertaining about it:

His speech, later on Wednesday afternoon, just as the daily apocalyptic thunderstorm was rolling in across Lake Pontchartrain, was completely of a piece with that persona. The applause invariably was a perceptible beat behind his applause lines, as though his audience briefly had to ponder the intellectual abstractions behind clinkers like, “I am not running for president to be someone. I’m running for president to do something.” before cheering. And, make no mistake, I realize that Jindal is running on a shoestring, but he really should pay his speechwriters because the folks who are working that job, evidently for free, really need to go.

OK, then. So how was your day? Mine was enervating, a slog, an afternoon of staring out a window at an ugly view, trying to build a head of enthusiasm and mostly failing. But I got done what I needed to get done, ate a sandwich and some chips and basically chalked it all up to a C-minus.

Not that there weren’t bright spots. I hope Sarah Palin saved her money over the last five years. A review of a truly awful movie is frequently a pleasure to read.

And an excellent piece by Rick Perlstein on the disintegration of the American left in the ’70s. Long, but worth your time, lest anyone get smug about swinging pendulums and suchlike.

Sorry this site has been such a bleh-fest lately. I’m in a rut. Speaking of pendulums. They always swing back, so let’s keep swinging and hope for the best.

I don’t know if it’s the pollen forecast or not, but today was a big improvement. It might have been the Claritin, too. But it was just all-around better, so yay me. Early-morning swim, midday productivity, lovely blue skies, a big fatty ribeye for dinner. Now the neighbors are having a drunken get-together in their back yard, just loud enough to be entertaining, not so loud to be annoying. It’s summer. Can’t complain. About anything.

Late in yesterday’s thread, Sue said something about the Confederate battle flat thing, to wit, how interesting that in less than a week, we’re no longer talking about guns and instead talking about a stupid flag. Not that it’s not a worthy issue, but there’s a certain squirrel! component to it. So quickly, we’re not talking about nine dead people, although I guess it makes sense — it’s easy to feel like you’re making a difference with a flat, whereas before, it’s all just despair.

Neil Steinberg brings up another point:

“Winds shifting on rebel flag” the Tribune headlined Tuesday.

Pretty to think so. They’re reacting to news that South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley called for the flag to be removed from its prominent place across from the State House in Columbia. Apparently the photos of Roof preening by Confederate flags prior to his alleged crime was too much in the wake of the slaughter at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.

But anyone who thinks the matter is settled hasn’t been paying attention.

Yep. This is too easy. It won’t go away.

However, along the way, we might have some fun laughing at these intellectual knots some wingnuts are tying themselves into. Fortunately, Roy handles that stuff.

A Neil Sternberg two-bagger today: A long, great read about the nature of facial disfigurement, and the people who try to mitigate it.

And you need to read Ta’Nehisi Coates’ piece on what, exactly, the Confederate cause entailed.

So we climb to the crest of the week, and look forward to the downside.

Yeesh, did I feel like crap this afternoon. Someone must have rubbed gravel in my contact lenses, or maybe it’s just allergies. I think I’m going to start speed-dating Alan’s antihistamine array and try to figure something that works, or it’s going to be a difficult summer, eye-wise.

On the other hand, I boxed at 6 a.m. today. The older I get, the more of a morning person I am. I’m perfectly happy riding my bike to the gym at 5:45 and hitting a heavy bag for half an hour. Just don’t expect coherence at 2 p.m.

An enormous storm threatened all day, and I watched it march relentlessly across Wisconsin, Lake Michigan and the lower peninsula. Words like derecho were in the forecast, which is a Spanish term meaning “charge your phone.” I believe it’s a straight-line wind, very concentrated. When Fort Wayne got hit by one a couple years ago, thousands were without power for days. So I came home, charged the phone, charged the laptop and…nothing happened. I mean, a sprinkle, followed by sunshine. The fearsome clouds punished Lansing, but not us.

So, then. Quickly, because I’m headed to bed:

It’s not over for the stars and bars, but when you lose Walmart, well…

And you know what? I don’t have much more. Think I’ll rub my eyes and hit the hay.