I call this one, “Nancy and a friend watch the World Cup.”

Sorry no post last night. Up late writing (not this), then slept badly, then blah blah blah excuses excuses blah blah. It seems a fitting day for a photo post, so I can get back to work. This will be it for the week, because it hath been a long one. But a big chunk of it is behind me, and will remain there for a while.

So. How’s the back yard looking? Goooood.

I wish I’d been more diligent about taking a full set of “before” pictures, because the difference really is amazing. As I think I’ve mentioned, two or three owners ago, in search of an obscene amount of parking, they picked up the garage, rotated it 90 degrees and stuck it smack in the middle of the lot. Then they built a deck and paved everything else. While you could comfortably park five cars in the driveway, and it was a great place to skateboard, it wasn’t good for much else. Since we’ve been here, the deck has only gotten crummier, so last fall, we tore it out, opened a HELOC and hired a concrete guy and a fence guy.

The concrete guy tore out two big sections and poured us a new walkway, and the fence guy fenced it. Alan built the patio and added a shit-ton of topsoil. We got it covered with leaf mulch just in time for the winter.

This year we went to the nursery and became big spenders. Cute dog sold separately:

Look, there’s Kate, taking my car away for another day. Good thing I’m a cyclist.

It’s still a work in progress, but already I can feel that oak tree sighing in relief; the deck was cramping its growth.

The furniture was expensive, but it’s year-round, because we thought it might be nice to sit outside and enjoy a fire in the warmer spells of winter.

I’m so happy with it, and we’re not done yet. (You’re never done.) Once we get the garage repainted, we’re erecting trellises along the full side, for a green wall.

In the meantime, no more places for raccoons and possums to hide with the deck gone, and Wendy has her green space. Sometimes I let her out and check on her later, only to find her lying on her side in the sunshine, absorbing solar energy.

So that’s the changes at the homestead. Tips and criticisms welcome. Let’s all enjoy our weekend, and I’ll see you back here on Monday.

Crashing on a deadline tonight, so here’s some linkiness for you today:

I love interactivity: See if you can find Benghazi on a map. (I got within 200 miles. Thought it was farther inland.)

When I die, hell will look like this: The Clown Motel in Tonopah, Nev.

The author of “The Looming Tower” has some thoughts about ISIS. Worth reading.

See you tomorrow.

I didn’t watch the NBA championship series, but I heard about the new Apple commercial via other channels. It uses the Robert Preston song commonly known as “Chicken Fat.” You can watch it at the link.

I know a lot of us here are boomers, and we were the first audience for this record. They played it on the radio (occasionally), in gym class (ditto) and on the local morning kids’ show, “Luci’s Toyshop” (often). Somehow a copy ended up in my possession, and the last time I remember following its instructions – touch down, up! Every morning, 10 times! Not just now and then… – was in high school, goofing around with my friend Jeff Clark.

The next day, I was sore in the hamstrings. Those toe touches can be murder if you’re not warmed up.

Anyway, the song was sort of a curiosity, but everyone knew about it. Which is why it’s so amusing to read the current reaction to it. That Slate story called it “strange.” Adweek mentioned its “odd history.” Daily Kos did the same.

I guess it’s come to this: We are now weird grandparents, with our funny 23-skidoo pop-culture memories. One minute you’re at Woodstock, the next you’re stinking up the room with your adult diaper and everybody’s reminiscing about Michael J. Fox.

OK. But I always liked the Chicken Fat song. It reminds me of a time when getting in shape was mainly about touching your toes and running in place. As if.

So, I read this story about Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in the New Republic this afternoon. It has conservatives in a tizzy, because it basically argues that Walker has benefitted from an enormously segregated Milwaukee metro area. It’s depressing, particularly in the details about the role talk radio plays in the area; just the first three paragraphs want to make you open a vein, but honestly, it’s not so different from what talk radio has always been. (Rush Limbaugh made the theme from “The Jeffersons” the background music for his Carol Moseley Braun updates, but hey — his producer is black, so no racism!) And I’ve admired a lot of public figures in my life, but never like this:

Walker’s only overt enthusiasms appear to be his Harley Davidson motorcycle and Ronald Reagan. He and Tonette married on Reagan’s birthday, and every year they celebrate their wedding anniversary / Reagan’s birthday by serving the Gipper’s favorite dishes, such as macaroni-and-cheese casserole and red, white, and blue jelly beans.

I encourage you to read it. It’s not all jelly beans and racism; some of the voter-turnout numbers from the suburbs are frankly astonishing.

So, what else do we have today? A story out of Indiana, in which a young mother, just 24 but already with three children, sticks her head out the window of a moving vehicle to barf, hits it on something and, of course, dies. Because life is tough in Mishawaka, and there’s nothing else to do.

Finally, this:

Now is not the time to re-litigate either the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 or the decision to withdraw from it in 2011.

Oh, shut up.

Another weekend so perfect it needed to go in a record book somewhere: Temperatures in the low 70s, cool nights, skies of such clarity it hurt to go outside without sunglasses. Kate took the ACT on Saturday and then hit the road for a no-parents Up North weekend with three friends and I decided not to worry about it. That’s a difficult thing to do, but at some point it has to be done. She’ll screw up; of this I have no doubt. I just have to accept that the screwups are something I don’t have much control over anymore. This was my advice as they left:

“And what do we do if we see a deer in the road?”

“Hit it!”

That’s exactly right, and advice every Michigan driver should know and heed. Never swerve. That’s how tragedies happen. Hit the deer. We have plenty.

(Obviously this is advice for if you see a deer in the road when you’re traveling toward it at high speed. You don’t just randomly speed up and run Bambi down on, say, a country lane. But you knew that.)

Speaking of cars, Alan brought home a monster Friday — a Chevy SS, which looks like a four-door sedan on the outside but has so much horsepower its ass end threatens to break loose on the regular. Gas mileage: 18 combined and say what? Eighteen? Yes. It’s less fuel-efficient than the Yukon he brought home earlier in the week. But so powerful, it’s a rolling Viagra commercial.

This is a perk of being on the auto staff at one of the Detroit dailies, one Alan barely uses. Of course my worry is more about carjacking than that he will fall out of familiarity with the product line, but it’s always fun to cruise up to Harrison Township and get some ice cream with the Underground Garage on the satellite radio. He works very hard. He deserves a little fun.

The car, and the weather, was a welcome distraction from self-torture, i.e., reading some of the response to the Iraq situation. I’m sort of done listening, and this John Cassidy piece on the New Yorker website says it all:

Senator John McCain, whom the President telephoned on Friday, has called on Obama to fire his entire national-security team, claiming, “Could all of this have been avoided? The answer is absolutely yes.”

McCain is right; it could have been avoided. If, in the aftermath of 9/11, President George W. Bush had treated the arguments of Feith, McCain, and other advocates of the Iraq War with the disdain they deserved, we (and the Iraqis) wouldn’t be where we are today.

If, in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion, Paul Bremer, the American proconsul in Baghdad, and his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, had not decided to disband Saddam’s army, the one institution that somewhat unified the country, the Iraqi state would be stronger. If, in addition, Bremer and Rumsfeld had ordered enough U.S. troops onto the streets to preserve order, then Iraq might (and it’s only a might) have held together peacefully instead of degenerating into sectarianism, anarchy, and violence.

This is a bigger clusterflick than Vietnam, albeit with a lower body count. But what we’re looking at now, in the Middle East and now Africa, is going to have worse fallout, I’d wager.

So that was the weekend, topped by a visit to the market that yielded garlic scapes, fresh spinach and all the dark green leafies we expect at this time of year. And strawberries. And peas. I’m going to salad my butt off this week.

I think the lead to this story might say more about our pathetic world than anything else I can find at the moment:

Farrah Abraham: reality star, singer, pasta sauce creator, sex tape maker and now, erotica author.

I hope that’s my epitaph someday. With the name and a few details changed, of course.

Almost time for “Game of Thrones,” and a new week, to start. Best wishes for a good one for all.

Whenever Iraq has a bad day, I remind Alan of that afternoon in Fort Wayne, in a news meeting at the alma mater, where he sniffed at the proposed layouts and headlines for the we-are-declaring-victory story. (I can’t recall what the “news” was; might have been the Mission Accomplished photo op.)

“We’re going to be there for YEARS,” he announced to the room, to scowls from all.

This was, what, 2003? I don’t think even Alan foresaw the disaster currently unfolding in Iraq, which must rank at the Worst Possible end of the potential-outcomes continuum when we launched this stupid-ass war. If we even considered the outcomes. And yet, I’m not getting a sense that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz et al are lying in bed staring holes in the ceiling at 3 a.m. I just don’t. Do you?

So. Nearly the weekend. I posted this photo on Facebook yesterday, but I thought y’all might like it, too:

My father was such a stick-in-the-mud sometimes. This was a trip my mother and I took in 1972-ish, by ourselves — he didn’t want to go — to southern Spain and across the straits to Tangiers, where this photo was taken. Travel is very broadening, and these are some of the things I learned: the elements of Moorish design, that champagne could be lethal (first time I ever got hammered; we were watching flamenco dancers), and that the souvenir striped djellaba will never be worn at home, despite what Graham Nash said. The proprietor of one restaurant in a mountain village had the English section of the menu marked with a Union Jack, and said he wouldn’t change it to the U.S. flag until we booted Richard Nixon from office.

I haven’t looked at this picture in a hundred years, or thought of that restaurant owner in a hundred and one. Funny, the power of a picture.

So, I guess everyone read George Will’s vile column about how college women look forward to being raped, so they can gain the “coveted status” of victimhood. The internets have filled up with rebuttals, but this one was the best I’ve read, and also the hardest to get through. As always when I read stuff like this, I wonder what has happened to young men that they would prefer having sex with an unconscious woman over whatever minimum effort it might take to find one through the conventional way.

I guess you’d have to ask Elliot Rodger that one.

Anything else? Brian Dickerson takes apart just why, in this state of roads so bad they resemble Somalia’s, that the legislature still can’t get it together to fix them.

And the weekend begins! It seemed like it’d never get here.

Another link salad today; it’s been one of those. Got to the gym and did a workout that I should label “the heavy one” — eating low-carb really saps your strength. But I found some links for you.

Mark Bittman is making sense:

Real food solves the salt/fat/sugar problem. Yes, excess salt may cause or exacerbate high blood pressure, and lowering sodium intake in people with high blood pressure helps. But salt is only one of several risk factors in developing high blood pressure, and those who eat a diverse diet and few processed foods — which supply more than 80 percent of the sodium in typical American diets — need not worry about salt intake.

“Fat” is a loaded word and a complicated topic, and the jury is still out. Most naturally occurring fats are probably essential, but too much of some fats — and, again, it may be the industrially produced fats used in hyperprocessed foods — seems harmful. Eat real food and your fat intake will probably be fine.

I know a lot of us struggle with weight here; I certainly do. But I think he’s on to something here. Eat real food. What a concept.

I haven’t had a chance to read this yet, but I will, because it’s been a big story here, about a 90-year-old man who was picked up as a drug mule, headed for Detroit. He was sentenced just a couple weeks ago, and got three years. “A death sentence,” he said. Tell it to someone who cares.

Jack White, beefer. Such an excitable boy.

When are the Republicans going to figure it out? It’ll be a while, I expect, with guys like this.

Almost the weekend.

Circumstances have me working at home this week, and I’d forgotten how much I enjoy it, at least in summer. Up early, swim, shower, put on yoga pants and a tank top and DON’T TAKE THEM OFF ALL DAMN DAY. I have to say that I equally enjoy those days when I get up, shower, put on makeup and head off downtown like a grownup, but in summer, days like this are sweet. You feel like you’re getting away with something. And the fact some actual yoga was involved is only the icing.

And now I’m sitting here catching up on the news and whoa! Eric Cantor loses his primary? This is like the end of “Fatal Attraction” where Glenn Close, having been drowned in the bathtub by Michael Douglas, suddenly rises out of the water with all her strengths and powers intact. The tea party lives.

Also, there was another school shooting Tuesday. A friend of mine is traveling in France for a month. I sent him a link to ShootingTracker.com, just so he can keep up with all that’s been going on in his absence.

It’s a beautiful day that others will remember as the worst of their lives. Isn’t that the way it always works out? I think the message is, if it’s a good one for you, enjoy it.

Because I have little else in my mind, let’s keep it light. When did Tom & Lorenzo stop calling Prince William’s wife Cathy Cambridge? Because I’m not digging Cathering, Duchess of Cambridge all that much. Even though I love her outfit. If I were a size-0 princess, this is exactly the sort of thing I’d wear. Keep it simple, keep it classic.

The modern dog leash is patented. I had no idea. Wendy and I use one ourselves; it’s really the only way to walk a terrier.

And with that, I wish you another perfect summer day. (Supposed to rain here.)

A few years ago I had a casual conversation with a Grosse Pointe cop, who defended his pension and salary, then added, “I’m a Tea Partier otherwise.” It was the first time, but not the last, that I heard this sort of cognitive dissonance, but so far I haven’t heard it again from any cops.

I hope, by now, that guy has gotten the damn message: These people are not his friends. In fact… Well, let’s let Charles Pierce sum it up:

Why are there not a million police officers on the National Mall right now, today, demanding that the Congress and the rest of the political elite take even the most gingerly steps toward disenthralling the country from its insane devotion to its firearms? Why are police officers not walking off their jobs in protest? Why are their professional organizations not raising holy hell about this? They’re on the very vanguard of what’s happening in this country. They’re not simply first-responders any more. They’re primary targets, for god’s sake. In Las Vegas, two of their brethren were specifically sought out and executed in a pizza joint. For all the talk we hear about how whatever the cops do to people we don’t like — the indigent, the black, the Occupy people — is justified by the peril of their jobs, for all the unfortunate souls who are tased to death, or shot, because some cop thought he was threatened by “something in the suspect’s hand” 100 yards away, for all the Amadou Diallos and Sean Bells who have to be gunned down because they posed some sort of “threat” to armed police officers, where’s the public pressure from the people in blue against the people who now actively hunt them down, and against the people whose livelihoods — political and otherwise — depends on the cultural and social climate that sustains the people who now are stalking cops in order to kill them at lunch? There’s been some movement, but do you know where some of them are? Spectacularly, some of them are on the other side.

I guess some people will say the couple who committed this atrocity weren’t really tea partiers. Whatever. When you go out of your way to drape the corpses of your victims with Gadsden flags, I’d say it’s beside the point.

Finally, if anyone has the gall to get up and say a good guy with a gun is what could have stopped these bad guys? I’m going to laugh them out of the room.

Oh, and in the Department of Of Course, it turns out the shooters have a connection to Indiana. Lafayette, specifically.

How was everyone’s Monday? I spent it starting at a screen and looking outside at the lovely sunshine, which I successfully got myself under at the stroke of 5. Dog walk, bike ride, gym, grillin’. Long evenings — this is what I’m talking about.

So, some bloggage? Sure:

The 2014 World Naked Bike Ride, a Flickr set from Portland. So much flab, so much tattoo ink. Clothes really do make the man — and the woman.

Also from Oregon, a wilderness wedding is threatened by wildfire, but the couple lingers for just a few more pictures. And gets at least one amazing one.

Finally, this is a long read, but a useful one: Dan Savage explaining the full circumstances of what happened when he became the target of some truly Orwellian transgender people.

The affairs of the Indiana Republican party don’t concern me anymore, but they had their annual convention in Fort Wayne over the weekend, and some news was bound to cross my social-media radar. There was a trio of truly laughable puff pieces from my alma mater on some delegates, but Richard Mourdock, the unsuccessful Senate candidate, blew everyone out of the water by going Full Godwin at the final curtain:

In a farewell speech to Indiana Republicans during the party convention Saturday, term-limited state Treasurer Richard Mourdock cautioned GOP members to be wary of politicians who promise entitlements and spending as debt grows. He said the Nazis made the same promises to Germans before that country’s 1936 elections.

…“And this is where I put on my state treasurer’s hat again for just a moment to give the most important lesson: The people of Germany in a free election selected the Nazi Party because they made great promises, that appealed to them because they were desperate and destitute,” Mourdock said.

He said the Nazis targeted one group after another, “but ultimately, they went after the Jews, they deprived them of their property, their rights, their citizenship. Because they were bankrupt.”

(Godwin’s Law, for those in the dark.)

I should be speechless, but who could be, at this point? I will say this: I always gave Steve Shine, the county party chairman, credit for hard work. To my knowledge, he’s never turned away a local willing to fly the flag, and that has included some real lunatics. To have a Jewish chairman defending statements like Mourdock’s, however, is either proof that the 11th commandment is alive and well or just shows how far I’ve come from northeast Indiana.

Fortunately, the state chairman seems to have his head screwed on straight. Standing ovation or not.

And that is something God intended.

A gorgeous couple of days we just had. I spent much of it working on my book project; it was a deadline weekend. School is down to its final-four days (finals for four), so I’ve made my last brown-bag lunch for the student. (I’ll continue making them for myself; brown-bagging is the way to go, for my money.) Kate’s band played at a shall-we-say nontraditional venue Friday night — an anarchist commune. Everybody was very nice. In keeping with the spirit of anarchy, there was no cover charge, just a “suggested donation in the $6-$11 range.” The commune is in an old Victorian pile, and the performance space behind looks like it was once a carriage house or someone’s motorcar machine shop. The anarchists fitted it out with a stage, and host events there on the regular. Alcohol is strictly BYO; we showed up with fo’ties and tall boys, the most depressing serving size on the planet, but for someone who long ago graduated to craft cocktails and designer beer, it was an amusing bit of nostalgia. And the girls played well, so it was a nice evening all around.

God, I’m so glad it’s summer. Every evening spent sitting outside just seems like a gift. In about an hour, I’m going to deliver on a long-promised drink with a friend, and I’m going to ride my bike there. It will be sweet.

My activities the last few days were pedestrian, and boil down to this: I’m glad I have an Aeron chair. So let’s go to the bloggage:

I’ve seen so many events like this I have to wonder if they’re deliberate setups. How often? Well, there was this one. And this one. This one was a prom, but I’d say it counts. Here’s another prom. When will they ever learn? Unless the bridge has a clearly stated one-ton load limit, or is made of cement, stay off. Unless you want to end up on the Today show.

I didn’t watch the Belmont Stakes, because I knew what would happen, and it did. I understand California Chrome’s owner went on a rant about the spoiler element of allowing tanned, rested and ready entrants into Triple Crown races to spoil it for horses like his. OK, I get it, but I think it’s a lot simpler: I think the whole thoroughbred line is cooked. Every thoroughbred goes back to three foundation sires, and are all related like an Egyptian royal family. Want to improve horse racing? Allow some selective crosses out to sturdier stock. But that’s just me.

So. Off for that drink, and then to make lamb chops. Unless I have three drinks, and it may be something a little more heat ‘n’ serve.

A good week ahead, all.

Dammit, I always miss the big anniversaries. First I missed June 3 and a chance to blog about “Ode to Billy Jo,” and now this: The 40th anniversary of the Cleveland Indians’ 10-cent beer night fiasco was Wednesday.

Fortunately, Michael Heaton remembered — he’d better — and brings us a Q-and-A with Dan Coughlin, a Plain Dealer sportswriter who covered it in 1974:

Q. When did it turn from silly to nasty?

A. Late in the game fans started throwing cherry bombs on top of the Rangers’ dugout. That’s when things got menacing. A fan ran out and grabbed Ranger player Jeff Burroughs’ hat. Burroughs went to kick the kid and fell. From the dugout Billy Martin thought his player had been attacked. That’s when the whole Ranger team charged the field with bats. The Indians even defended the Rangers as a form of professional courtesy. The game was called then because fans had stolen all three bases. The game couldn’t continue.

Alcohol and drunkenness is not inherently funny, but every time I read about this dark day, I crack up. Fans literally stole the bases. A woman ran onto the field and flashed her breasts, and a father-son team did a double moon, then slid into second base. That’s funny.

I read a deeper dive on this a few years ago, from the bloggers at Lawyers, Guns & Money, which provides some historic context:

The 1960s and 1970s were an awful time for northern Ohio, as the departure of heavy industry and the frenzied flight of white residents to the suburbs helped cut the city’s population nearly in half from its post-World War II high of 900,000. By 1974, Cleveland was five years past the infamous Cuyahoga River chemical fire and four years from declaring bankruptcy. For those who were able to struggle out of bed on June 4, the opportunity to drown in cheap alcohol must have seemed like an instance of divine intervention.

I’m a little wary of throwing the Grand Sweep of History into these things, but they’re right about the preceding years not being kind to the region. The detail about the Kent State shootings in 1970 that only locals remember was the wildcat Teamsters strike that the Ohio National Guard had only recently been called off of. It was a nasty one, with striking truckers dropping heavy objects onto Guard convoys from highway overpasses. From that exhausting duty, the troops were called out to police student demonstrations at Kent. So: Deindustrialization, white flight, urban decay, the national shame of a student slaughter. To this, just add beer; what could possibly go wrong?

Not funny, I know.

Even less funny: A beer in today’s MLB facility will cost you about $8.

And I should also add that despite today’s headline, I like Cleveland very much. I always have a good time there.

OK, so: I must rush today and crash a deadline on the book project, but I have one thing I want you to look at, completely without comment from moi. The photo is set for Public on Facebook, so I’m hoping you can all click through to see three Michigan legislators showing how well they understand women.

A great weekend to all, and I’ll be less-crushed on the other side.