The incidents of scrap-metal thievery are great enough in number that they make a bona fide trend story, but I’m finding them lacking something, say, a sense of outrage. You can pile up the details all day, and there are scores — the theft of a green plaster statue of Jesus from the outside wall of a church, mistaken for copper; the stripping of a landmark fountain on Belle Isle, a six-figure repair for maybe $200 in scrap; the “NO METAL” signs on houses and commercial buildings around the city; the catalytic-converter gangs that can cut yours from your car without tripping the alarm — but still not get a sense of how bad it is.

A couple weeks ago, I heard an NPR piece on the theft of manhole covers in Philadelphia. A driver can hit an open manhole and do hundreds or thousands of dollars of damage to a car, but a cyclist can do the same thing and die. So you might say I paid close attention to this. The reporter interviewed a spokesman for a trade association of metal recyclers, who, in the tradition of weasel spokesmen everywhere, said scrap buyers bear no responsibility for this trend, and perhaps the cities most affected should work harder to secure the valuable ($20 in scrap, hundreds to replace) items, or maybe replace them with something less valuable, like fiberglas.

This being radio, and public radio at that, I waited in vain for the reporter to ask, “Are you telling me that a buyer has no obligation to raise questions when someone brings in five manhole covers reading ‘City of Philadelphia’ on them? Because I’d really like to get you on the record here.”

The linked story above has no scrap-metal spokesman — maybe he was busy doing a Black Mass or something — but it does mention the usual feeble effort of the city to crack down:

Last year, Detroit tightened its ordinance on scrap sales by requiring all dealers to produce paperwork and a video of all scrap sale transactions. “It has reduced copper theft in the city of Detroit,” said Bettison. “But now many of the scrap thieves go outside the city to sell their stolen metals.”

Well, that’s comforting.

As usual, Jim at Sweet Juniper has a beautifully written piece that captures the agony perfectly;

With China’s voracious demand for raw materials and the shocking increase in value of recyclable metals over the past few years, increased scrapping and theft are no surprise. But in places like Detroit the problem is so vast, fighting it seems almost futile, like those farm workers beating away the locusts in Days of Heaven. Occasionally a scrapper will die cutting a live wire, but six more step forward to take his place.

You see scrappers all the time in their beat-down old cars and trucks filled with metal: aluminum siding, radiators, steel fixtures, copper piping. I often see them inside Detroit’s wide-open and abandoned historic structures. Most artifacts of architectural significance have long been pillaged (for example, the terracotta lions from Lee Plaza that passed through the Ann Arbor antique market before being incorporated into new condo developments in Chicago). But there is still some rusty metal to be ripped away from the walls in most of these buildings. While showing that BBC documentary crew around a few weeks ago, we came across a mini van filled with metal driving around inside the old Fisher Body 21 plant. They are like maggots feeding on wounds; parasites devouring the viscera of this dying city.

We’ve already heard of aluminum docks around our lake place in south-central Michigan being stolen. Are scrappers taking your city apart, too?

No bloggage today — it’s already time to get changed for twice-weekly weight class, which recently went to a new teacher who believes it’s not weightlifting until the bar is sagging, apparently. Kill me now. If an open manhole cover doesn’t kill me first.

Talked to a couple of old friends in the past few days. One recently had a hysterectomy, and it went well. She described the moment when the doctor came in to her hospital room and announced she could be released, just as soon as the surgical packing was removed from her vagina — gauze, mostly.

“You know that trick where the magician pulls out a long string of scarves, and it just goes on and on and on?” she said. “It was like that, only grosser.”

The other one told a few stories about her work life, which are the best stories ever. I’d pay money to see her one-woman show someday, and maybe I will. If you want to collect good stories about people, don’t bother becoming a bartender. Become a house cleaner instead. Better stories. One of my editors used to say a mailman knew more about your life than any other stranger who touched it. I say it’s your house cleaner, who knows the state of your marriage from the remains of your romantic dinners for two, and certainly by the number of votive candles arrayed around your bathtub. This friend used to clean empty houses for Realtors, and could tell the ethnicity of the former owners with astonishing accuracy:

“Asians lived there,” she said. “Long black hairs in the bathroom, lots of spilled rice in the pantry.” Indians left behind cooking smells, and favored certain paint colors. (White folks like neutrals.)

The best story she told me was about a lovely house in an upscale suburban area that one of her clients picked up very very cheap. It had been trashed, she said, by the previous owner’s children. It seemed that one day mom ran off with her boyfriend and moved to a faraway state. Then, a few months later, dad accepted a job in another distant city. When the teenage children, who were entering their junior and senior year of high school, objected to the relocation, he said, “OK, you kids can live here until you finish school. You’re old enough to take care of yourselves. I’ll send you some money. Bye.” You can imagine what happened: It became party central, a cushy crash pad for every local kid who needed a place to drink, get high or get laid. And over time, no doubt egged on by the effectively orphaned tenants, the place was very nearly destroyed — they threw cans of house paint out the window onto the driveway to see what it would look like, let the pool go back to nature, wrecked the furniture and carpets, punched holes in the walls and so on. Rehabbing it was a six-figure job, and it was practically a new house to begin with.

That should be a movie, don’t you think? The most interesting stories are be-careful-what-you-wish-for stories.

I have the bestest friends.

Bloggage:

My new rock-star husband, Don Was — yes, Rodney Crowell, while I will always love you, it’s all over between us — was in the Metro Times last week. I missed the show he was promoting, The Don Was Detroit Super Session, and yes I am kicking myself. But he’s so generous in his interviews, which is one reason I love him. They just go on and on and on, and he says so many interesting things. I bring this up because we were talking about the Jill Sobule album-financing deal a while back, and lo, guess what happened:

MT: Other than the Todd Snider project, do you have anything else major coming up?

WAS: Well, just before that, I finished an album with Jill Sobule. She did the original “I Kissed A Girl,” but she shouldn’t be judged on that. She’s a really deep songwriter — both funny and profound. She has a devoted fan base, and she had a “telethon” on her website where fans could contribute as little as $18, for which they got a T-shirt and an early download of the album. For $10,000 — which some people actually bought — you got the hyper-platinum package which allowed you to come and sing background vocals on the album. And she raised $85,000 in about three weeks. Then we made that album — recorded and mixed it — in less than two weeks. Same basic principle. And, you know, there’s just, something about it – that immediacy.

And also in the Metro Times, one of the Starbucks that’s closing is the one on Jefferson in Detroit. Alas, it was beloved by someone other than the usual nobodies:

Long before Renee Zellweger’s brief marriage to country “singer” Kenny Chesney, long before Jack White married model Karen Elson while floating down a Brazilian river, the movie star and the rock star were, as your grandparents might have called ‘em, an item. Zellweger spent much time in Detroit, in fact, which was a shocker to us regular folk who spotted her wandering about in supermarkets and dining in restaurants like someone who is, as she calls herself, “just kind of normal”… “Oh, yeah,” she says, drawing the “yeah” out with a few extra vowels. “I’d like to say hi to my friends at the Starbucks on Jefferson. Nice guys.”

A little housekeeping: I’m now on Twitter, as NNall. Like Facebook, I don’t quite get it, but maybe I can figure it out.

The Starbucks closing list is now public, and I’m pleased to see our local isn’t on it. I’m generally pleased with Starbucks, except when I am not. I won’t rehash all the standard bitching about the mermaid, because it doesn’t matter; Starbucks introduced dark roasts to much of America, and give them that at the very least. If it’s much more difficult to palm off a watery brown tincture as something worth your $1.25, then they’ve done the world a service.

Of course there’s a downside. I saw it last week in the Las Vegas airport, on a short layover when all I wanted was a great big cuppa strong black coffee, and got stuck in line behind the eight pickiest people in the world. When one opened with, “I’d like two tall skinny soy lattes, one just a tad cooler than the other,” I threw up my hands and sought out a fast-food place down the row.

Once upon a time America drank coffee. And America was strong. An America that drinks tall skinny soy lattes — one just a tad cooler than the other — is an America that is, dare I say, French.

Ah, well. I have bigger fish to fry today. Picked up the dog yesterday, and could feel his bones poking through his coat. He’d been off his feed most of the week, the vet said. OK, can’t blame him — abandonment in one’s dotage is probably grounds for a hunger strike. Since he’s gotten home, he’s done nothing but eat. And then sometime last night, he got up and pooped on the dining room floor. Which is either the beginning of the end, or just evidence of a senior citizen’s discombobulated constitution. I’m going with the latter. Poor old man. In seven weeks, he’ll be 17. Deaf, mostly blind, but still swingin’.

Speaking of dogs, let’s swing into some tasty bloggage today with one I’ve been carrying around a while. I don’t know how many of you read the NYT’s magazine cover story weekend before last, the one on psychotropic pharmaceuticals for pets, but it made me laugh so hard I nearly had my own dining-room accident:

Aggression is a feline problem too. A few weeks after visiting Dodman, I went to the home of a man in West Los Angeles whose pet was on Prozac. The owner, Doug, asked me not to use his last name because he didn’t want business associates to know about what he called his “cougar psycho little miniature stalker” — Booboo the cat.

Booboo was apparently poisoned by an unfortunate dried-flower-eating incident, which led to the onset of, I dunno, catzophrenia:

From then on Booboo was different. He would periodically ambush Doug. Over time, Doug noticed that attacks were more likely if he smelled at all abnormal — for instance, if he had been near a woman wearing perfume — so he would take a shower after coming home and then change into his designated cat-wrangling outfit.

…Doug led me up the stairs in his house to the second floor. He donned a pair of khakis that he had lined with heavy-gauge ballistic nylon and washed up because he had shaken hands with me. He crept toward the master bedroom, where Booboo was permanently quarantined behind a door that had been remounted to swing outward to facilitate quick escapes by Doug. “Just behind this door lurks the Tasmanian devil,” Doug said before slipping inside. I squatted at ground level and watched through a transparent doggy door. The 400-square-foot room had a walk-in closet, a four-poster bed and a floor-to-ceiling view of Beverly Hills mansions dotting a scenic canyon. The suite belonged entirely to Booboo, though Doug said he was now able to sleep over a few nights a week. Booboo slinked past the window and gave me a steady gaze. He had a tuxedo coat, mostly black but with patches of white on his feet, underbelly and forehead. Doug scooped him up and they nuzzled face to face. “He’s just warm, soft and fuzzy, and he purrs, and he’s cuddly,” he murmured.

The theme of the story: These critters wouldn’t need all these drugs if we, their owners, weren’t quite so crazy ourselves. Good reading.

Those who can get back to the land, do. Those who can’t, delegate. Another reason to hate California foodies:

Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden? That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves. Call them the lazy locavores — city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.

Here’s a story that’s been getting some play here of late, about a Michigan woman who escaped from prison in 1976 (drug charges), went straight, assumed a new identity and was found 30 years later living the good life in the suburbs of San Diego. The question is, of course, how do you treat a self-rehabilitated soccer mom whose original crime was non-violent but whose escape from custody remains unpunished? As one, the howl goes up in Michigan: Send her back to prison, for a very very very long time!

I am not among those howling. Of course she deserves punishment; the state has to do something. But jailing her again seems pointless, and what’s more, I know of a punishment that will a) hurt; b) hit her where she lives; and c) help the state of Michigan. Among many other things. And it is? Ahem. Fine her.

Fine her big. If her family wants her on the outside so bad, make them pay a hearty sum. Half a million, say. Or more. Why is this so hard? You’re welcome. Just call me Solomon.

Off to the gym, which I am dreading.

Please don’t get me started on flying commercially in this country. I don’t do it very often, but I have many strong opinions, most involving the stubborn refusal of too many customers to check their bags. It really chaps my ass, getting on a plane with a bunch of people, all of whom are trying to shove 10 pounds of bag into 5 pounds of overhead storage. It’s like traveling with a bunch of Soviet Siberians, back when the only place you could buy anything was Moscow, and you had to shlep it home on the Trans-Siberian Express. Of course, if you asked any of my fellow travelers, they’d say they’ve all lost luggage, oy but it was a nightmare and never again.

I’ve never lost my luggage. Maybe it’s just luck. To be sure, I don’t fly often. But before every flight, when the agent is tagging my bags, I check to make sure they have the right city on them. I rarely board with anything larger than what can be tucked under the seat. And for an extra 15 minutes at baggage claim, I am not one of the problem people.

How often in your life do you get to say this? If only there were more people in the world…well, like me.

Back and happy to be so. A few thoughts/clarifications:

** Just for the record, I didn’t spend my entire vacation thinking about the food movement in northern California. But I always need something to think about, and the Kingdom of Foodies made for satisfying vacation cogitation — not particularly consequential, and a lot less scary than, say, the fate of Fannie, Freddie and IndyMac. Plus, it was reinforced with every overpriced-yet-tasty meal.

So please don’t get the idea I’m obsessing about this. But I just came back from my post-vacation replenishment of the fridge and pantry, and it’s on my mind. Again.

Here’s what I spent a lot of time thinking about: Why do people I have so much in common with bug me so deeply? I enjoy eating well, eating local, eating slow. Few things bring me as much joy as a farmer’s market in July. I think fewer pesticides and chemical fertilizers is a good thing. I want the earth to be replenished by our agriculture, not depleted by it. I think farm animals have a right to cruelty-free lives.

And yet, one morning when we were getting dressed, the local NPR affiliate carried a local feature about a speed-dating event for people interested in green living, i.e., people who believe all those things about food, plus a few more covering how they live their lives and get to their jobs. One of the interviews was with a man who went away disappointed at the lack of commitment he found — people who thought recycling a few bottles and tolerating compact-fluorescent light bulbs constituted a green lifestyle. As opposed to him, for instance, who did everything short of composting his own excrement.

It wasn’t what he said that struck me so much as the tone — that blend of 90 percent smugness and 10 percent whining. It tickled a zone of deep familiarity in my brain before I figured where I’d heard it before. It is precisely the same one employed by certain Christians (I’m thinking Missouri Synod Lutherans here, but your local variety may be another denomination) when they’re finding fault with a world that fails to live up to their expectations and, far more important, reward their piety with social approval. And that’s when it clicked: This isn’t a lifestyle choice or even a movement, it’s a religion. And there’s nothing like religion to rinse all the fun out of something.

** How’s this for irony? When we were in Carmel, Clint Eastwood’s hometown, guess where he was? In our hometown.

** Sorry, Danny, didn’t make it up to Muir Woods, but we did spend an afternoon at Point Lobos State Reserve, and another kayaking on Elkhorn Slough. We got a pretty good dose of California’s loveliness.

** Someday I’d like to live in NoCal, if a) I can somehow go there with about $10 million in my pocket; and b) I can ever figure out the weather. As a Midwesterner, I prefer our Fisher-Price version — it comes from the west, it can be seen coming for days and days, there are no mountains to impede its progress and “summer” generally means “temperatures above 75 degrees.” The coastal breezes were wonderful for the first 48 hours — hey, why are all these people wearing down vests? — until we got acclimated, and then it was just, well, freezing. The rule seemed to be: Whatever the weather is in the morning, it will be the opposite by afternoon. Although it could be something else entirely.

Well, I have my old weather back now: The humidity smells like mold, not sage. The weather is on its old pattern, and sorry this is a disjointed mess but I have to go pick up the dog, whom I miss more than I ever imagined. Hang on, Spriggy — I’m on my way. The rest of you, back in a bit. And thanks for being such good chatterboxes when I was gone. You can run my bar anytime.

There’s a church here. You probably have a church. If you’re like most Americans, somewhere in your church you hear the phrase “Father, son and Holy Spirit.” In church here, they say, “Organic, humane and sustainable.”

It’s sort of annoying; I think food should nourish, not polish your ego. But it makes for some tasty lunches. Yesterday: Cheese from Cowgirl Creamery, bread from the Acme Bread Company, sausage from some place next door, wine ditto, chocolate ditto. We ate it on the observation deck overlooking the bay, outside the Ferry Building:

(There was supposed to be a photo here, but like I said: Our internet connection is spotty and imperfect. Couldn’t upload to Flickr.)

I don’t mean to clog up your time with these updates, which aren’t that interesting. But I needed an entry to hang this bit of bloggage on, which is worth clicking through just to see the picture: Internet sting nets ‘World’s Greatest Dad’.

Off to Monterey today.

Just a quick pop-in to say hi. We’re having ourselves a fine time. We have (spotty, imperfect) internet access. We have not gone native. We are tourists, out ‘n’ proud:

This trip — rent a bike, cross the bridge, lunch in Sausalito, ferry home — is highly, highly recommended, especially on a day that starts cloudy and ends in blazing sun. Even though I was faked out by the heavy morning overcast, failed to apply sunscreen and got my first burn in years. Even though riding the bridge means navigating with the squadrons of hard-charging native cyclists, none of whom are amused by our slow-moving, head-swiveling, camera-toting presence. I call all these people, male or female, “Danny.” I never got an open sneer from a Danny, but I did cross against the light in front of one, forcing him to slow and probably making the microscopic difference in his lung capacity that will tank his time in his upcoming triathalon.

Sorry, Danny. Shit happens.

Yesterday was Golden Gate Park, the seashore, a little shopping. Today, lunch at Ferry Marketplace:

Ah, I have found my people.

(Actually, that’s a complicated question. For every happy surprise — walk into an ordinary-looking pizza joint and find it stocked with tradesmen enjoying pizza with [angel choirs] fresh tomatoes and diced fresh basil on top — there’s more than a hint of foodier-than-thou, which can get real tired, real fast. However, it still tastes very very good, and my palate is enjoying this trip very, very much.)

Breakfast, then lunch awaits. Gotta run.

I’ve run dry, folks. Blogging may resume mid-week, depending on my internet connections, or it may not. Consider this an open thread for whatever you want to discuss. Active this week: Bloggers at The New Package start in on Generation Kill, and I’m sure Coozledad will have a few stories to tell. Back July 21 at the latest.

Last day before vacation, and it’s already filled with duties and errands. So not much today but a bit of attention that must be paid:

My ex-colleague William Carlton, arts writer for The News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, died unexpectedly earlier this week. The story going around is that he called 911 in the middle of the night, and by the time the medics arrived he was unresponsive. Bill had a history of heart problems and lived alone, as befits the odd duck he was.

How odd? Well, let me tell you who Bill’s previous employer was, before joining the N-S when I did, in the large Class of ‘84: The New York Daily News. That paper was already struggling then, and offered buyouts to reduce staff, and Bill took one. Why he was crazy enough to come to the opposite end of the earth from New York City remains a mystery to me, although I asked him several times, and got explanations that all boiled down to a shrug: Why not? He brought a lot to the newsroom — a certain tabloid, rat-a-tat-tat prose style full of puns and wordplay; a gruff personality that could still sparkle, usually when the topic was ribald; and a wide and deep knowledge of the arts that revealed itself in both his work and in his casual newsroom conversation. It was always a pleasure to talk to him and be surprised by his knowledge — he once explained to me why opera singers are the greatest musicians and the truest artists on stage today, and did it so concisely and expertly that I still believe it.

Not that he was a snob. He had an abiding love for boxing, and could explain the ballet of a heavyweight fight with equal authority. I once asked him how George Foreman or Buster Douglas or some unlikely victor had done it, and he pointed to a spot on his chin and said, “See this? There’s a button right here. If you look very closely, it says, ‘The Puncher’s Chance’ on it. Hit the button just right, and goodnight Irene.”

The paper asked Alan and I me for memories of Bill, but mostly they’re, um, unsuitable for a family newspaper. I remember when a local bail bondsman who owned a few massage parlors was on trial for pandering, and Bill, an unapologetic customer of one of them, explained to a rapt metro staff how the front-room procedure worked. (”But forget Friday nights. The high school football teams tie everything up.”) I remember his story about going out drinking with the Daily News staff after work, and the obscene Algonquin Round Table banter: A drunken photographer sat down opposite a crusty old national correspondent, a woman, and said, “Barbara? I want to eat your pussy.” Barbara took a world-weary drag of her cigarette and said, “Jesus. Doesn’t anyone just like to fuck anymore?”

Alan told them about the time a penguin at the zoo unleashed a torrent of digested smelt all over his brand-new Banana Republic khakis and Bill expensed them. That’ll probably make the paper.

When the turmoil at the paper started, the real downsizing, Bill stuck around to see what the new editor was about. He took her measure accurately in about five minutes, and decided to retire. I don’t know if he ever looked back. I got an occasional e-mail from him, and like so many people you spend eight hours a day with one day and zero the next, more or less disappeared.

Wherever he is now, I hope there’s a good title fight on pay-per-view and and opera across the street. Bill appreciated the whole spectrum. I guess that’s the point.

Every so often Lance Mannion mines his old notebooks for blog entries. Well, I don’t have old notebooks, but I do have NN.C. I started this site in part because it would require me to write something every day, to keep a journal of sorts, to keep a notebook in one form or another. So here’s something I turned up in my search for the Dexter column yesterday. Be glad you don’t know me in real life, for I am, apparently, insufferable.

This is from February 7, 2002:

Yesterday one of our neighbor’s kids stopped by. Middle-schooler, collecting information for a school paper on peregrine falcons.

“There’s been a peregrine falcon in our neighborhood,” he said.

“No way,” I told him. “Not around here. You’re almost certainly confusing it with a hawk. Red-tailed, Cooper’s, one of those. They’re big, they look like falcons.”

He insisted it was a peregrine. I insisted it couldn’t be. We had a short argument over whether they roost in trees in populated areas. I suspected I was putting him off, so I told him he ought to check out the Raptor Chapter, a non-profit that does rehabilitation on injured birds of prey. “Do you have the number?” he asked. I invited him in while I fetched the phone book. Alan walked in at this point. “Connor here thinks he’s seen a peregrine falcon in the neighborhood,” I said. “No way,” he said. Etc., etc. “Besides, they’re migratory,” I said. “They’re on the coasts at this time of year.” Connor said they weren’t. “I think you’d better check your research,” I told him.

Alan wondered what I was doing with the phone book. “I’m looking up the Raptor Chapter number for him.”

“The Raptor Chapter? They didn’t have the permits! The duck dicks shut her down,” Alan said.

“Shut her down? Janie? When?” I said.

“While back,” he said. “Of course we ran a couple paragraphs inside, after all that stuff we’ve been writing about her all these years.”

At this point I looked at Connor, who appeared somewhat dazed, no doubt thinking, Why the hell did I ring the doorbell of these lunatics? “I have a field guide, if you’d like to check it,” I said, gently. “Or you could call the Indiana DNR. They have lots of information. Guy name of John Castrale runs the peregrine reintroduction program.”

Finally, the thought occurred to me: “Why did you stop by, Connor?”

“I wanted to ask if you’d seen the falcon,” he said.

“Uh, no,” I said. And with that, he left. If I could have that five minutes to live over, I’d do it differently.

Bloggage:

I have a friend who works in TV news here, and whenever I bitch about the pathetic journalism — and fourth-rate star power — of local anchors, he rolls his eyes and give me a jaded, what-can-you-do look. However, I think even he would be appalled by news of a Detroit news anchor participating in a crooked deal between a sludge treatment company and the city council, and I hope on behalf of journalists everywhere, this paragraph made his eyes pop out:

Stinger, who joined Fox 2 as an investigative reporter in 1997 and became an anchor in 2004, was paid about $325,000 a year by Fox 2 Detroit in 2005, according to divorce records.

Actually, as TV-news anchors are paid — she anchored the morning news show — this is pocket change. All to look pretty. No wonder every Miss America contestant wants that gig.

Kids these days. Adults these days. Sheesh.

Early exit this morning — it’s back to the gym for mommy.

If you haven’t seen this, you gotta see this:

He quit rather than lower flag for Helms.