A friend sent along a weird story from my alma mater the other day. (Not the usual alma mater, which no longer exists, but my first alma mater, the Columbus Dispatch.) It’s about the spread of evangelical Christianity among the Ohio State football team. The top:

Like the Great Awakenings of years gone by, a religious revival is emanating from Ohio State’s campus.

The mouthpieces of revival aren’t buttoned-up pastors yelling about fire and brimstone. And they aren’t speaking under tents or at church pulpits.

They are Ohio State football players. Often, their platform is on the field and on social media. And it stays the same, even when they falter on the field, as they did in the College Football Playoff. Their message?

“JESUS WON.”

Ai-yi-yi. This is not a sports story. It’s not even really a religion story, or rather, it’s a religion story with quotes like this:

“It was the most surreal feeling. The second I hit the water and came back up, I felt weightless. Like the feeling of all the burdens on me that felt like they were physically weighing me down were taken away in that just outward profession of my faith,” he said.

And this:

“What has taken place in my life and the lives of other people on this team — and I know I’m here to talk about football — but it’s a true testament of the Lord that I serve.”

Is this journalism or a tent revival? I was encouraged to check out the byline’s short bio on the website, and learned the writer’s beat: “Kindness/Religion Reporter.” What’s more, “She is currently supported by the Center for HumanKindness at The Columbus Foundation.” Say what?

(I should mention, these fellowship-funded reporting jobs are pretty common, usually so that a small-but-poor news outlet can have a reporter with a dedicated beat like criminal justice, the environment, health care, etc. But I’ve never heard of one dedicated to…kindness.)

But to be sure, the Center for HumanKindness, one word, exists. Mission statement:

The Center for HumanKindness is on a mission to inspire acts of kindness and strengthen social connections in our community. Every kind act—big or small, seen or unseen—makes a positive difference for individuals and the broader community.

As nasty as I can be, I am often a very kind person. Please, thank you, big tipper, give a sandwich to the hobo, help a stranger who slips on the ice, all that. But my nasty side says I am sick of Be Kind bumper stickers, the dumb Day of Kindness social-media static, all of it. In Nance’s world, the Center for HumanKindness would be called the Don’t Be An Asshole Center.

Because all this Be Kind propaganda comes at a time when we are being absolutely manhandled by people for whom “unkind” is the mildest possible description. This doesn’t feel like a time to respond with kindness, but rather, with a right cross to the nose, a kick to the ribs and a HOW DO YOU FEEL NOOOOOW, STEPHEN MILLER. At some point, “be kind” starts to feel like wallpaper, like peace signs in the ’60s.

Oh well. At least the day got off to a good start:

That’s for Bob (not Greene), a swimmer who appreciates a fresh workout. And the country playlist was perfect for this morning. One of the second-hour guys ambled out from the locker room and said, “So this is why Charlie was singing ‘Jambalaya’ in the shower.”

Time to clean a bathroom and feel productive. My closet-cleaning is way behind schedule.

One goes to bed on a quiet-ish Friday night, one wakes up on Saturday morning to discover that even though we are observing Dry January, somehow overnight, we acquired Venezuela. Like we’d drunk-ordered it from a catalog.

What was worse was running my usual Saturday errands, turning on WDET where they were carrying the presser live, and hearing the commander-in-chief rambling on about crime in Washington. Seriously, he sounded way more senile than Biden ever did. Then the baton was passed to Pete Hegseth, and he went on in the same vein, heaping hosannas on Tubby and boasting about the “lethality” of our military. He loves that word, lethality. I reflected that I’m often contemptuous of these people, often exasperated, often angry, but on Saturday? I was fearful. For all of us.

Because Cuba is next, I fear.

I really don’t have anything to say about this, because it would come out in all caps and no one wants that. We are a nation led by idiots, fools, toadies and [insert a few more insulting words here]. And honestly, what’s the point? We all know where we stand, and that the only power we have is to work and vote against it. So let’s do it.

As for the others, as Hegseth likes to say, they have fucked around, and they will find out.

How was your weekend? I spent Sunday getting Christmas out of the house, and as always, it feels like I have another room in my house now. Time to settle into 2026 and make a difference.

And this update:

It didn’t take long, did it?

The other day I scrolled past this video on some social network. It’s from the NYPost, and if you don’t have the interest in clicking, it depicts Mr. and Mrs. Jeff Bezos partying in St. Barth’s. The cutline describes them as being at “celebrity hotspot” Nikki Beach, and sure enough, you can see them sitting in a booth as a howling DJ narrates a birthday parade of the usual crap — sparklers in a big bottle of something, presumably champagne, someone carrying a sign, etc. Mrs. B stands up on her seat and shakes her hips. Mr. B smiles broadly. What a good time they seem to be having.

The Bezoses were not alone in the Caribbean. There are apps that show the position of every vessel with a transponder, and apparently a bunch of billionaires and their yachts were spending New Year’s in St. Barth’s. So the Bezos were with their people. People who understand them, people who know their struggles, people who get them, because they’re the same.

And they spend their time at clubs where they stick sparklers into bottles of champagne. Honestly, I’d drown myself. Just go right over the rail into the warm Caribbean, hope an outgoing tide would carry me away.

I had my club years, don’t get me wrong. I remember yelling over the music, dancing, having fun. But — and this is key — it was over by my…27th birthday. I wasn’t 61 (as Bezos, aka Baldilocks, is) or 56 (as Lauren Sanchez, aka Beelzeboobs, is). Those two nicknames, which are perfect, are not mine, but I found them online and will use them forevermore.

Anyway, this observation dovetailed with something I read about the various photos included in the Epstein photo dump. Such ghastly rooms, where so much terrible stuff happened. No warmth, just weirdness. All that money and they can’t even hire an interior decorator?

How have we spent the last 50 years venerating the rich when they live like this? I ask you.

Onward. I swear, I keep clicking Unsubscribe on Semafor emails, but for some reason I keep getting it. In a recent issue, asking “what media leaders got wrong in 2025,” I read this, by Ryan Broderick:

This might be slightly premature to say, but I think the death of Charlie Kirk — and Trump World’s subsequent forced national observance of grief — is having the opposite effect of what I initially thought. If you had asked me in September what would happen, I would have said that Kirk’s murder was the American Reichstag fire, the moment the Trump administration and its great and powerful cyber army would finally conquer the information landscape and complete their authoritarian crackdown on free speech.

And a bit of that happened, sure, there was harassment, and doxxing, and people lost their jobs for insensitive posts about Kirk. But it didn’t last. Only a few months later, there is no bigger joke on the internet than Charlie Kirk. Every feed is full of Kirkified slop and AI brainrot mercilessly making fun of MAGA’s martyred influencer. The tail of history is long and these things always evolve, but, as it stands currently, Kirk is the Harambe of the 2020s and MAGA has never felt more cringe, old, and worst of all, boring.

Ain’t that the truth. And you know why? The widow Kirk. Everybody grieves differently, but when you’re taking the stage maybe a month after the assassination of your husband, wearing skin-tight leather pants, enough makeup to shame Tammy Faye and with pyrotechnics announcing your entrance, even true believers are going to be put off and perhaps ask, “Who are these freaks?”

Finally, in the ritual of closing the 2025 planners and starting the 2026 versions, I found the list of books I read last year. Nineteen, well under my goal of 25, but much of my fall was spent reading for the writing class I took, so: oh well.

That’s what fresh slates are for. Full speed ahead, and have a good weekend.

I was thinking earlier today about that glorious run we had in the late ’80s, when one money-grubbing televangelist after another was going down in flames. Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart were the biggies, but they were big enough to deflate the entire grift, and that was enough. Jeff Borden and I toured Heritage USA when he was living in North Carolina, and I believe it was after Bakker’s fall, when Jerry Falwell was running it. It was…sad, but served to cement so many of my feelings about both evangelical culture and the American South, which is not my kinda place, except for visits here and there.

There was another great time, during the Clinton impeachment, when Larry Flynt, pornographer and patriot, was taking down the GOP morals squad. Newt Gingrich, Bob Barr, all those hypocrites. They didn’t all stay down, but it was great to see them take fire.

We need another run like that. I feel like it must be coming, but seeing yet another of the good guys, Tatiana Schlossberg, go out early? It feels terrible. Why her and not her terrible uncle? He’s the idiot who guzzles raw milk, and she didn’t even get to see her daughter turn two.

Mixed bag at midweek, so let’s go.

Those of you who live in Michigan know we had something called a “bomb cyclone” Sunday and Monday. The U.P. had a full-on blizzard, but downstate it was a little bit of snow, a 40-degree temperature drop from one day to the next and fierce winds that made that 22-degree final temperature feel like knives on the skin. I considered talking Alan into driving south to observe the seiche effect on Lake Erie, but that wind? :::shudder:::

A seiche (French for “wave”) is what happens when a fast-moving weather system pushes lake water so hard that it effectively drains part of the basin. Western Lake Erie was high and dry, while Buffalo saw their water rise by several feet. There was one earlier this year, and the pictures were amazing, but this one was better. Here’s one from a local meteorologist’s Facebook page, credited to Austin Lada. Anyone lose a snowmobile through the ice a few years back?

Those are zebra mussels covering it, by the way. Invasive species, but the war was lost long ago.

The next time this happens, we’re going, dammit.

Some excellent journalism to point you to, also. First, the Chicago Tribune’s long read about “Operation Midway Blitz,” better known by its popular name, ICE Assholes Invade Chicago Because It’s a Blue City. It’s very well-written, with excellent photos, too. I believe that’s a gift link; at least, I hope so.

I still have a few gift links to share before the month ends, so here’s a social-media talker: Robert Draper’s NYT profile of Marjorie Taylor Greene. I’m not fooled by her apparent conversion, but there’s some spilled tea here:

For Greene, the decades that (Jeffrey) Epstein spent eluding justice for exploiting and sexually assaulting countless girls and young women while amassing a fortune, and the seeming efforts by the government to cover up the injustice, “represents everything wrong with Washington,” she told me. This September, Greene spoke with several of Epstein’s victims for the first time in a closed-door House Oversight Committee meeting. She knew that the women had paid their own way to come to Washington. She saw some of them trembling and crying as they spoke. Their accounts struck her as entirely believable. Greene herself had never been sexually abused, but she knew women who had. In her own small way, Greene later told me, she could understand what it was like for a woman to stand up to a powerful man.

After the hearing, Greene held a news conference at which she threatened to identify some of the men who had abused the women. (Greene says that she didn’t know those names herself but that she could have gotten them from the victims.) Trump called Greene to voice his displeasure. Greene was in her Capitol Hill office, and according to a staff member, everyone in the suite of rooms could hear him yelling at her as she listened to him on speakerphone. Greene says she expressed her perplexity over his intransigence. According to Greene, Trump replied, “My friends will get hurt.”

Hmm. OK.

Finally, you’ve heard the expression “I did not have (astounding news event) on my bingo card,” I’m sure. Well, with the help of bingo-card generators, you too can have one. Here’s mine, from bingobaker.com:

Let’s see how I do. The next time we speak, it’ll be 2026. Remember: All we have is ourselves. Make it count.

An interesting topic came up in a group chat this weekend. Here was the precipitating statement:

Are old-fashioned manners outlawed these days? As a childless uncle and aunt, we’ve always been very generous to our nephews and niece. Now that they’re adults — my niece is studying law but the boys are working — we send them sizable checks. As of today, still no thanks. Hell, we’d settle for a text. All three are good people, yet they seem unaware of basic common courtesies.

It so happens this is something I’ve noticed myself. Wedding gifts in particular don’t seem to be acknowledged. (Not by Deb’s boys, I hasten to reassure her. They wrote lovely thank-you notes.) I bought one a few years back, working from the online registry, and as soon as I hit Purchase a robo-email landed in my inbox: Bob and Sue thank you for your generosity! The hell they do. They checked a box, maybe, on their registry, to enable the robo-reply.

I know I didn’t get a proper thank-you afterward.

And having had a wedding of my own, and knowing how insane they tend to get, I don’t think this is always a hanging offense. Couples get overwhelmed, cards fall off of boxes, shit happens. But with wedding gifts in particular, so often they’re sent directly to the bride’s or couple’s house before the wedding. You want to know they arrived, at least. Porch piracy is a real thing. But it seems weird to ask, although Alan did, once. He got a mumbled yeah I think so and only learned later the marriage didn’t survive very long, and maybe that’s why the thank-you was never sent.

I blame parents for not teaching their children better manners, although given the way Gen Z reacts when asked to do anything involving setting a pen to paper, maybe they did and they were just ignored. As my friend says, just send a text. It’ll probably be enough.

So, the great interregnum of the year is upon us. I hope you all had a lovely Christmas; I know we did. Gifts and food and more food and cocktails at 3 p.m., all of it. I got some wonderful gifts, large and small. I’m currently waiting for what is supposed to be more apocalyptic weather on Sunday, torrents of rain followed by plunging temperatures that may or may not lead to snow, but will surely freeze the puddles left behind. Good thing this is my vacation from my early lifeguarding shifts.

And I’m doing Dry January, again. In fact, I’m looking forward to it, after all the rich food and 3 p.m. cocktails of the past few days. I want to eat vegetables and drink sparkling water, or just plain old water. Settle in for the long haul until spring not feeling like the Goodyear blimp.

Couple quick things: For four days now, I have been unable to load this site — my own site! — on my phone, but it works fine everywhere else. Anyone else having the same problem? I get this error:

J.C. says he blames “the DNS services your phone’s provider is serving your phone with.” I have no idea.

Another housekeeping note: I reloaded the WordPress app on my phone, thinking it would be easier to post more often, with photos and such. Alas, these posts (like yesterday’s) seem to default to closed comments, even though I thought I changed that setting. I’ll keep tinkering, but be advised I’m aware of the problem.

Finally, let’s all take note of the example of Chuck Redd, the jazz musician who cancelled his Christmas Eve jam at the Kennedy Center after the toadies running it added you-know-who’s name to the building. Harvard is buckling. Big Law buckled. Big Media buckled. But this guy didn’t. Let a million Davids bloom. Keep your slingshot handy. We are on our own, we all know that now.

I was at the Eastern Market on Saturday when a Waymo taxi passed me. Someone was behind the wheel, which I take to mean it’s still undergoing testing, but we’ll likely have the driverless vehicles in Detroit before long. I texted a friend that I look forward to setting one on fire during the bloody riots of summer ’26. I was joking, but only kinda. We all know the year ahead will be grim, as the midterms approach and the Trumpers get more desperate. Be like Chuck Redd. Maybe we’ll get through this.

An unlucky pig and parts of many more, as the pork-eating holiday approaches.

I know many of my readers here are older men, and older men are famous for their love of military history, so I’m asking one of you to explain it to me like I’m five: Why would we be investing in a new class of naval battleships, when naval battleships haven’t been relevant to modern warfare since the Second World War? And how many times have we been told the next war will be fought with drones and software? How do battleships play into that?

Seriously, I want to know. This makes no sense to me.

I know I’ve been scarce around here of late, and I will likely be scarce going forward. I’m writing this while watching my kitchen floor dry, and I still have a few things to do before I’m ready for the holiday. So let this be the last one for a while, unless some photos present themselves. I wish every last one of you Merry Christmas or whatever holiday you observe, including Festivus. I do not have a lot of problems with your people, because in fact, you’re the best.

Back later.

Although the snow we’ve had almost all melted in the last couple of days, it’s still winter (almost), and hence, bird-feeding season. Alan has set up the suet feeder for the woodpeckers, the thistle seed feeder for the goldfinches, and the gen-pop feeder for the rest.

And now, the war with the squirrels begins.

Sometimes I’ll be upstairs and Alan down, and I’ll hear GODDAMNIT accompanied by a sharp rap on the window, and I know that, once again, some crafty squirrel has figured out how to leap from the fence onto the finch feeder, and use its sharp little teeth to rip big holes in the screen. Alan added another piece to the pole, raising the height, which would (he thought), not be reachable, but that didn’t last. Turns out squirrels are good jumpers. Now he’s talking about adding a length of wire to the takeoff zone, to foil a clean leap.

He’s been making noises about electrifying it, but I’m pretty sure he’s kidding.

As for the rest of the week, let’s just forget it, shall we? Between the Reiner murders, and President Shit-for-braiins’ reaction to it, to the renaming of the Kennedy Center (which will forever be the Kennedy Center, sorry), to yet another utter disgrace at the White House, I just want this week to be over. Soon it will be.

Watch out, squirrels.

So, is Susie Wiles about to be spending more time with her family?

My guess: No. For all of his fondness for bellowing YOU’RE FIRED, he won’t fire any of the hand-picked lackeys who fluff him all day. But my guess is, it will make the underlings regard one another with even fiercer and more vicious thoughts blazing from their eyes.

You know who I think about sometimes? Bobby Kennedy. Here’s a guy who has been catered to, looked up to and otherwise fluffed himself, all his life. But for these cabinet meetings, he has to bow and scrape and ass-kiss like the rest of those yo-yos. It must chap his ass like nothing else, sucking up to that pig. All of that swallowed bile has to go somewhere. I’m thinking the fallout, when all of this explodes, is going to be epic.

And that was just this morning.

I don’t know if Roy’s excellent Substack today is unlocked, but here are a few good parts (and you should subscribe):

In his first term Trump pantomimed some policy interests, but these were impossible to take seriously. You may recall, for example, his stupid “Trumpcare” alternative to the ACA that was so poorly conceived his factota in Congress dragged their feet on it, terrified at how voters would react if it were actually put into practice, until John McCain did them the favor of killing it in the Senate. And with COVID he mainly handed off the work to the health bureaucracy while yammering so nonsensically about it on TV that it killed his 2020 campaign.

In this second term you can see what Trump, relieved of any obligation to make it look good for political reasons, is really about, and it ain’t steering the ship of state.

Since Congress ended the subsidies that were keeping ACA premiums down, his approach to the chaos that ensued isn’t some new version of Trumpcare 2.0 — it’s just letting everyone know he doesn’t give a shit what happens (“Don’t make it sound so bad”). He is observably content to see millions of Americans lose their insurance as revenge for having signed up for something called “Obamacare” in the first place.

Revenge is a big part of what fills in for policy in Trump governance. His reaction to the rebuke he received from the electorate for his pandemic malfeasance, too, has been a pathological act of vengeance against the health care establishment — indeed, against the very idea of health care, with the appointment of an actual dangerous lunatic to run it.

Yessiree.

Not much more to report today. Got two-thirds of the work shoveled off my desk, and am tentatively looking forward to a pleasant holiday interlude, if you ignore all the bad news in the world.

I saw the news about the Brown University mass shooting Saturday evening, and woke up to the Bondi Beach mass shooting Sunday morning. I have no thoughts about this other than: :::deep sigh.:::

No, just this: Mass shootings are a true American export, aren’t they? As always, more will be revealed about both incidents, but that’s my knee-jerk reaction.

So let’s wait a bit before we talk too much about it.

And it was such a pleasant weekend, too. Erected the tree, squired the out-of-towners around a bit, hit a Christmas bazaar, set up a wrapping station in the basement, spotted a Cooper’s hawk sitting on our back-yard fence. My plan to get the decks cleared by today isn’t going perfectly, but it’s close enough.

If you follow sports at all, you’ve probably heard about the travails of the just-fired University of Michigan head football coach, Sherrone Moore. It’s a tale as old as time: Sexually profligate man allows his sexual profligacy to get the best of him. We don’t know all the details yet, but it seems pretty obvious that his main side piece was his executive assistant, herself the daughter of an NFL scout and an Erika Kirk doppelgänger, minus the Tammy Faye Bakker level of eye makeup. Moore is said to have “grabbed butter knives” from her kitchen drawers in a confrontation, and threatened to kill himself with them and make her watch. I don’t know how she responded to this threat, but needless to say, it came up at his arraignment and, well. Like I said: A tale as old as time.

At least he was fired for cause, which means the university won’t have to pay out his bloated contract, as Michigan State University is doing with its own fired coach. For once, I find myself in complete agreement with Nolan Finley, the conservative ed-page editor at The Detroit News. I’m sure his column today is paywalled, but these two grafs are hammer-meet-nail dead-on:

Schools hire coaches who promise to take them to the mountaintop, sign them to lengthy, multimillion-dollar contracts, and when no championship banners arrive in two or three years, cut them loose and go looking for their next savior. Most end up stuck paying the salaries of both the old coach and the new one at the expense of students.

Look up the road to East Lansing, where Michigan State University will be paying $32.5 million over the next five years to fired coach John Smith, and $30 million over that same period to new coach Pat Fitzgerald. So the head coaching position will cost MSU roughly $12 million a year. And if Mel Tucker wins his $125 million wrongful discharge lawsuit, that figure will skyrocket.

I used to say the best job in America is to be the first ex-wife of a billionaire: Marry him, birth and raise the kids, then bail out with an eight- or nine-figure settlement when a spiritual sister of Lauren Sanchez enters the chat. Now I think it’s being a losing football coach with a multi-year contract.

One last note, a story that dropped online a few days ago, but I’m just getting to today, about how the loathsome Tate Brothers were sprung from custody in Romania thanks to the Trump administration, and yes, that’s a gift link. It’s as upsetting as you’d imagine, and my takeaway is this: No more hands off Barron Trump, that poor innocent kid, who appears to have blossomed into the apple that doesn’t fall far from the tree, or a grosser metaphor about assholes and shit:

Barron, now 19, admired Andrew (Tate), and spoke with him over Zoom last year, according to Justin Waller, a mutual friend who was on the call. During the call, they discussed their shared belief that the Romanian criminal case was an effort to silence the Tates, he said.

Maybe he never had a chance, being the son of a criminal and a whore, but he’s made his own choices.

Off to enjoy a very cold Sunday, if “doing some work” can be called enjoyment.