How does anybody keep up with the news these days? Just yesterday I was thinking I’m an empty cup, and then I opened my laptop and WHAM MAGA idiots say Haitians are eating cats and WHAM tropical storm Francine is bearing down on the WHAM debate stage set for WHAM that “Sound of Freedom” guy, who is being sued by a bunch of women for — quelle surprise — being a sexually aggressive creep.

Closed my laptop. Let the room grow quiet again. Took Wendy to the vet (enflamed gums). Picked up a novel (“Demon Copperhead”). Sometimes you have to unplug. Just for a little while.

It’s a shame that the so-called mainstream media have fired or bought out all their columnists (or hired terrible ones), because damn, there are people writing more or less for free who have a lot of smart things to say. This piece on the “sanewashing” of Trump is really good.

If it feels like half the electorate has gone mad, that’s in part because the press continues to fail to present Trump as he truly is. The average voter probably doesn’t spend much time watching clips of Trump’s rants or reading his unhinged screeds on social media. But they might consume reporting that consistently “sanewashes” his derangement.

The sketch comedy series Key and Peele had a bit where the calm, no-drama Barack Obama (Jordan Peele) would have his true thoughts conveyed through a boisterous, profane Anger Translator (Keegan-Michael Key). The press has functioned as Trump’s Sanity Translator, to far less amusing effect: They filter through his nonsensical, offensive gibberish and offer readers a sanitized version that’s more PR spin than actual journalism.

MAGA cultists might consider Trump the second coming, but many swing voters hold a more reasonable, if still inaccurate view: Yes, Trump’s a jerk, but he knows how to fix the economy. The reality is that Trump’s both a bigoted creep and a total buffoon who can barely string a coherent sentence together on policy.

The centerpiece is the word salad served at the New York Economic Club last week, after someone asked him what plans he had, if any, to make child care more affordable. The answer:

Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, uh, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka, was so, uh, impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue.

But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t — you know, it’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.

But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.

Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have — I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time. Coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country — because I have to say with child care, I want to stay with childcare, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth.

But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.

We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about: Make America great again. We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question.

How do people — sane people, members of the fucking NYEC, sit and listen to this and not erupt in jeering afterward. Or just say, “I don’t understand. Please explain again.” The question-asker went on CNN later to complain. She should have complained to his orange face. But as the piece linked above points out, MSM reporters didn’t do much, or any, better. They reported this answer, maybe with an adjective like “jumbled,” as though it played by the rules. And as much as I admire those few soldiers left trying to fight this war, we need new rules of engagement. Because the old ones don’t make sense anymore.

I reckon we’ll have a lively pre-, during- and post-debate commentary here, so let it begin.

Because Twitter has lost virtually all of its legit advertisers — new releases from major studios/publishers, large corporations, etc. — it’s getting interesting. “Interesting” in the sense that if you’re into cheap Chinese gadgetry, hoo-boy. But also certain self-published, or practically self-published, books. You know me; I can resist neither bad writing, nor procrastination. And that’s how I ended up here:

To this writer’s credit, however, at least he’s finished something. Can’t say that here. I look forward to duplicating this exercise when “Melania” drops…whenever. Just looked it up: October 8. Imagine that. I guess we’ll see what that old ho’ has in store.

Speaking of propaganda, I’ve been alternately appalled and amused by the Tenet Media story (gift link). That is, the Russia-buys-U.S.-influencers story. Will Sommer, the WashPost reporter who covers such things, was chuckling through his briefing on “On the Media” the other day. It’s hard to believe anyone could be this stupid, but what do I know:

Most of the six members of Tenet’s “talent” team claim they did not know the money was coming from Russia. (Canadian activist Lauren Southern has not issued a statement as of this writing.) The indictment alleges that Tenet’s founders and Russian backers misled at least two of them, (Tim) Pool and (Dave) Rubin, about the source of Tenet’s funding by inventing a fictitious Belgian investor named Eduard Grigoriann.

Ah yes, an Armenian Belgian with an extra N on the end. I wonder if this real Eduard Grigoryan is getting any mileage out of this. I also wonder if Pool, Rubin and the other dullards on the team saved any of the money Tenet was paying them, as they were standing smack in the middle of a virtual firehose of cash. Because I doubt misfortune will smile on them in that way again.

Finally, the work peak is leveling out. I hope I have more time for you guys. I will. If I wanted to work this hard, I wouldn’t have retired.

More later this week.

And just like that, the four-day downtown festival I worked is over. I slept in my own bed last night, not the RenCen Marriott, although there’s something to be said for awakening to a view of the Detroit River in dawn’s early light, the sign from Caesars Windsor reflected in the water, looking like spilled…blood, I guess. Appropriate for a gambling house, wagers being responsible for gallons, tankers of blood-spill through the ages.

In the Canadian fashion, that casino is non-smoking. Progress.

And for now, I plan to rest for two days, then turn my attention to another project. I hope that by Christmas, my workload will finally ease.

I’d forgotten what it’s like to be so busy you can’t pay attention to the news. Thursday night is about when I checked out, although being in a hotel room with cable, I was able to watch much of CNN’s interview when they replayed it through the weekend. It was amazingly dumb. The questions were all about prompting reactions to stupid shit various GOP blockheads have said. Why should Kamala Harris have to dignify Trump’s racist comments? Why should Tim Walz have to answer expressed ignorance about his own child? Fuck every last one of them.

As they say on the internet: WhY wOn’T ShE TaLK aBouT PoLiCy?

Fortunately, my room also had Netflix. So I could put on early “Sex and the City” and just let ’em roll as I dozed off.

Today, I have to clean-clean-clean the house before Alan’s sister arrives for a visit. So short shrift again, but I’m hoping things will settle down, soon.

The view from my window for four days:

Back in about 48 hours.

I’ve been seeing it here and there — maybe even in these comments — that there are fewer Trump yard signs in evidence, and this is maybe a hopeful sign. I, too, have noticed this. There’s the guy across the street and a few others here and there, but definitely not as many as ’16 and even ’20. However, I don’t think this is good news. I think it’s a sign of trench warfare. I think we’re just exhausted. Why bother with a yard sign? Is it going to change any minds? I don’t think so.

That said, I impulsively stopped at the Grosse Pointe Dems storefront and picked up two Harris/Walz signs, one of which is in my yard. Gave the other to a friend. We’re hopeful.

But I’m mainly here to tell you that the social-media work I’m doing is eating my leg off, and it all comes to a climax this coming weekend, which is my way of saying this may be the last you hear from me until after Labor Day. The next few days will be action-packed. But I’ll have my laptop, and I’ll try.

Today I mainly want to draw your attention to Neil Steinberg’s excellent blog on Robert Kennedy Jr., on the occasion of the utter rejection of all he claims to hold dear, and his willing embrace of Trump flunkydom.

None of it is news at this point, but this was a sharp observation, I thought:

RFK Jr.’s story is not at its end, unfortunately, but now continues, to a fresh hell, the humiliation of being a Trump acolyte. Take a glance at a piece I wrote in 2016, “Chris Christie in rags” about the “stunned, miserable stare” on Christie’s face when he found himself standing in Trump’s rogue’s gallery of supporters, just another supernumerary to the Great Cheetoh God, hoping to huff a contact high of ego and power. The former governor of New Jersey later tried to reinvent himself as a person with a functional conscience, and speak out against Trump. Too little, too late. Or as I sometimes will write a reader: a person who thinks that Donald Trump is a good idea for this country can’t really expect anyone to care what he thinks about anything else. It’s the same reason you don’t ask homeless people for stock tips. I wonder as RFK slides deeper into the Trumpian netherworld whether it will ever occur to him that he had done this to himself.

It’s sorta breathtaking, in a way: An environmental lawyer has now allied with a man for whom the environment is a golf course. A vaccine opponent who’s now in the pocket of the man who, in his one decent act as president (although a no-brainer), fast-tracked the Covid jab. And I keep thinking about RFK’s voice, his spasmodic dysphonia, which he is said to believe was the result of a flu shot, and refuses to treat. I hadn’t heard him speak in a while, and on Friday, I was struck by how difficult he is to understand. The condition is treatable, with Botox shots to the larynx, but he refuses to get them. And now he’s hoping for a high-level position in the second Trump administration — Trump, a man who picks his inner circle on the basis of how they look, and was said to be repulsed by Nikki Haley’s slight skin discoloration. You just know he’s imitating his new supporter the minute Sad Bobby leaves earshot.

But you know what? It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. So the hell with him.

Now it’s back to the video-editing mangle with me, and I wish you a pleasant unofficial last week of summer. We’ll see if my yard sign gets stolen.

God bless you, girl:

LIVE from the DNC – @JackPosobiec: "How many abortions have you had?"

DNC Attendee: "I'm being paid by George Soros to have an abortion on stage." pic.twitter.com/AyQvgivtSI

— Human Events Daily (@humaneventslive) August 19, 2024

That’s the way to deal with these weird freaks.

I didn’t watch any of the RNC, so it’s hard to compare however they did their roll call of the states with the raucous, DJ-spinning roll call I’m watching now at the DNC. They just hit Idaho, and the DJ cued up “Private Idaho,” which is probably the only danceable song ever written about that place. What will it be for Michigan? Either Motown or Eminem, but I’m figuring it’s gotta be Motown. Whatever it is, this is pretty cool, although I loved the virtual roll call in 2020 and the calamari ninja from Rhode Island.

They should play this song for Rhode Island. Wouldn’t mix with the high-energy groove, but it’s definitely one of those only-song-written-about-it kind of places.

And now Michigan! And it’s Eminem after all.

Kamala is in Milwaukee tonight, running a similarly high-energy rally. Meanwhile, the orange menace was in Howell, Michigan this afternoon, where he took over a police station for a “press conference” of 150 journalists and 70 or so supporters. It was…not high-energy:

it's the second straight day where a sedated-sounding Trump has been ranting incoherently at an event (this time in Howell, Michigan) while people are forced to stand behind him for way too long. Note the complete lack of reaction to everything he says & the fact that he appears… pic.twitter.com/9iY7biRO7Z

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 20, 2024

We might pull this thing out after all. But keep the pedal to the floor all the way.

Not much more today, except to direct you to this very excellent essay by A.R. Moxon, taking apart J.D. Vance’s agreement with a podcaster that went like this:

In recent days we were reminded that back in 2020 the bestselling author, pretend hillbilly, future prospective vice president candidate, and full-time awkwardness enthusiast Jorts Decider “JD” Vance went on Eric Weinstein’s podcast, and nodded along with an out-of-pocket statement that the host made.

The statement was that raising grandchildren was “the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female.”

It’s a great piece, but here’s where it rang all the bells for me:

It might be a bit hard for Vance to dodge the rap, though, since he’s spent so much of his time in recent years agreeing with creeps who say creepy shit about women, and being a creep who says creepy shit about women in order to impress creeps who say creepy shit about women, and generally just acting like the kind of creepy little suck-up who calls women “females”–which is to say one of a whole passel of moist pallid online dudes who freebased Jordan Peterson throughout the 2010s and antisocialized themselves into treating relationships with women as a sort of transactional warfare between sexes, in which men are bold adventurers looking for sex and family, which are natural human connections they seem to view as video game achievements to be bestowed upon them if they enter the proper cheat code, in which women are hidden clay jars containing sex and family, to be discovered and then once found added to the inventories of adventuring men as acquisitions. A number of these creepy perverts got rich on tech or crypto or whatever, and they think their wealth makes them geniuses instead of just wealthy, and the ones who didn’t get rich through tech or crypto or whatever seem to think the wealth of the others conveys genius upon themselves, so now they go around talking about themselves as Alpha Chad masters of the universe, and speak of other human beings like they’re fodder for their whims, and generally sound do their very best to sound like eugenicist mad scientists in Victorian novels.

Egg-zackly. These people aren’t just weird, they’re dangerously weird.

And they’re only to Pennsylvania! But it’s very entertaining. So I’ll leave you here.

I expect by now the outrageous tale of Judge Kenneth King of the 36th District Court here in Detroit has spread to your neck of the woods, but just in case it hasn’t…

Judge King is something of a showboat. No, he is a shameless showboat, no something about it. His courtroom actions are streamed on his YouTube channel, and you know what they say about courtroom cameras — sooner or later, someone’s going to play to them, and in this case, it’s the judge. He seems to consider himself an undiscovered court-TV personality, and has a fan group that he regularly interacts with on Facebook.

So the other day a local nonprofit brought a group of teens to his courtroom on a field trip, and one of them, Eva Goodman, fell asleep during the judge’s talk to the group. He didn’t take this well:

After speaking for about 45 minutes, King walked over to the young woman and screamed, “wake up!” Then he asked if he was boring her, before suggesting “there’s one in every group.”

Alas, Eva was very tired that day, and fell asleep again. Well. This was too much for King:

He ultimately decided she needed to “take a walk in the back to see where we keep our people who are disrespectful to the court.”

On Wednesday, King told the Free Press he felt disrespected mainly by her body language.

About two hours later, he had court staff bring her back into the room. At this point she’s wearing a green jumpsuit, the words “Wayne County jail” printed on the back. Her hands are cuffed in front of her body.

…Jumping from his seat, King repeatedly questions the young woman before offering his own comments.

“You sleep at home in your bed, not in court. And quite frankly, I don’t like your attitude,” King said.

Yes. He had this sleepy girl dressed in jail clothing, handcuffed and then? He held a mock trial, of sorts, and threatened her with juvenile detention. You really should read the story. It’s amazing.

But it gets worse. It turns out the reason the girl kept falling asleep? Her family is homeless. Not living-on-the-street homeless, but the more common variety of bouncing around from place to place with her mother and siblings, and the previous night had been a rough one. This came out later, when the circle of people who know about King’s courtroom had expanded well beyond his fan group.

The best thing written about it was this column by a Freep contributor, who pointed out, correctly, that this is one reason black teens run from police, etc.:

(H)is actions reinforced the pipeline to prison culture that community activists are continually fighting against. That culture includes everything from metal detectors and uniforms in public schools to forcing young people to cut their hair because it’s too long, or suggesting that wearing a hoodie or engaging in other normal teen activities are inherently suspicious and must be policed.

Precisely. It needs to be pointed out, again and again until people get it, that the reason Ferguson, Mo. exploded 10 years ago wasn’t the death of Michael Brown, but the years-long abuse of poor people by not only the police, but the entire judicial system, and you should read Radley Balko on this subject:

After the death of Michael Brown, we learned that black and poor residents of St. Louis County were essentially treated like walking ATMs. The mid-20th Century migration of white people to the suburbs, and then the exurbs — and their attempt to exclude black people each step of the way — resulted in an astonishing number of tiny “postage stamp” municipalities, most of which had their own police department and were funded by fines and fees imposed on their residents. The poorer the town, the more it needed fines and fees to operate.

Anyway, things aren’t going so well for King at the moment. His docket has been taken from him, he lost a teaching gig at Wayne State, and he’ll be lucky to keep his job, although he probably will, unless Fox News snatches him up and makes him a member of The Five or something.

But enough about him. Let’s turn instead to the turgid prose of Tim Goeglein, who apparently has found a sucker editor at the surviving daily in Fort Wayne, the Journal Gazette, willing to publish his columns:

He writes on Sunday of his misty water-colored memories of going to the Embassy Theater downtown to see old movies with Ma and Pa Goeglein:

The rain was pouring in monsoon-like waves in downtown Fort Wayne. The cars were splashing buckets-full of water hither and yon. People were skittering across the puddled streets like stones across ponds.

Everyone was being lashed by the fury of a Midwestern downpour, a soaker.

The windshield wipers clicking at record speed, my father pulled up our maroon Jim Kelley Buick LaSabre to the front doors of the Embassy Theatre on West Jefferson Boulevard.

All I remember seeing was a forest of umbrellas amid the bright, luminous, brilliant, beautiful lights of that singularly familiar Embassy marquee flashing its message: “Friday Nights at the Movies.”

Tim owns a thesaurus, but hasn’t absorbed the message that you don’t have to use all the synonyms when you look up an adjective.

It goes on — and on and on and on — until it reaches a sloppy climax with what else? The organ recital that preceded the movie:

We found seats midsection, and then, as if on cue, rising like a phoenix from the floor, as if out of nowhere, a kind of magic happened: the most glorious, riveting tones of a colossal organ as if from the highest plain of heaven.

Pipes of every tone and tempo kept us awash in the glory of pure sound, a kind of elixir for the ears.

It was the Grande Page Pipe Organ, rising before us as if from the MGM soundstage in Hollywood itself. Has there ever been a more amazing instrument in the history of our nation?

Well, yes, Tim. These theater organs were quite common in old movie houses. There was one in Columbus, which I heard when my mom took me to the old-movie screenings at the Ohio Theater there. There’s one in Detroit, at the Redford Theater. But I’m amazed at Tim’s amazement: Pipes “of every tone and tempo.” The “most glorious, riveting tones.” The MOST AMAZING INSTRUMENT IN THE HISTORY OF OUR NATION.” I’d think he was kidding if I didn’t know he wasn’t.

After one of his last columns, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Journal Gazette. Cruelly, they didn’t print it. So I will copy/paste it here:

I haven’t lived in Fort Wayne for nearly 20 years, but given the role I played in the loss of his White House job, I’ve since taken a particular interest in Timothy Goeglein’s writing, appearing occasionally in the JG’s opinion section. As a writer myself, and as one who wants everyone to be a better one, sometimes this is painful; I’ve rarely seen such floridly composed word salads, to use a phrase Tim might employ. I won’t call them “hate reads” — I’m trying to be a better person in my dotage — but my fingers often twitch toward an imaginary blue pencil to strip the lard, the filigree, and especially the adverbs out of his rhapsodical tributes to whatever misty water-colored memory is striking him today.

I’m also an editor, and know that self-editing is difficult. But can’t anyone at the Journal Gazette take a little hot air out of these balloons, perhaps by paring Tim’s “tall and willowy, thin as a rail” piano teacher down to just “willowy,” as that word literally means tall and thin? Or suggest that “a museum specializing in great art” redundantly states the definition of art museums, unless he knows of one that specializes in mediocre stuff.

To Tim, I offer my services as a writing coach. My email’s easy to find. Give me one paragraph, 100 words tops, on…something you dislike. Tight. No adverbs. We’ll start there. It may be a journey of a thousand miles, but it’s gotta start somewhere.

He won’t take me up on it. Sigh.

OK, Monday looms. Punch it in the face!

I’ve mentioned this here before, but for you folks who need a catch-up: I got a new phone a year ago, and no matter what I do, I cannot get it to stay paired with my car’s sound system. So rather than spend any more time trying to make it work, I have been listening to over-the-air radio on trips around town. (For longer ones, I have a small speaker I just stick in the console.)

Anyway, there’s an AM station here, CKWW, out of Windsor. It’s automated, which means a visit to “the studios” will find no people, and only a desktop computer cycling through the playlists. I read somewhere they use the playlists of the legendary CKLW, the old 50,000-watt behemoth of the golden olden days of AM radio. But it’s only 500 watts, which means it’s hard to pick up on the west side of Detroit. Fortunately, I spend most of my time on the east side.

Honestly, I’m kind of philosophically opposed to oldies radio, but sometimes NPR just gets to be too much to take. And while it’s interesting to go spelunking in the no-higher-than-30-40 range of 1970’s charting hits, what has really captured my interest are the newscasts at the top of the hour.

CKLW, back in the day, leaned hard into Detroit crime, and its “20-20 News” was designed to capitalize on it. It was tabloid, lurid and sometimes alliterative: “The battered body of a buxom blonde bounced once and came to rest on the sidewalk,” “The blood-smeared highways of Michigan claimed 14 more lives over Labor Day weekend,” and if you like this sort of thing, this 10-minute compilation is spectacular.

But CKWW’s news is distinctly…Canadian. The other day they reported on a bicycle theft, complete with a detailed description of the crime, the victim, and a description of the suspect. Yesterday a similarly comprehensive report was delivered, on a man who “committed an indecent act” in a public park, complete with a sketch of the perp available on the station’s website. This the tenor of the crime reports, day after day.

Now, I know Windsor isn’t some paradise. However, I also know that on a different Canadian station I used to listen to, around the new year there was a report on how often police had used force on arrestees, prisoners, etc. It was a little jarring; around here, where cops shoot people fairly often, the Canadian report mostly concentrated on the use of nightsticks. So I think it’s fair to assume the city across the river is a quieter, less violent place.

I wonder what it’s like to live like that.

In other news at this hour, I watched “Jaws” again last night, for the first time in a while. For all the talk about the mechanical shark failing to work, why doesn’t anyone mention the opening sequence, which covers maybe 20 minutes of action but starts in full darkness, switches to early-evening gloom, then pre-sundown, then just after sundown, before going back to full night? Damn amateurs.

Wait. I see someone has indeed discussed this.

Happy Wednesday.

The news has been moving at such a blistering pace of late. I know this story has already been passed around, but honestly, it was so interesting I have reread it a few times, and you should, too.

It’s about how Tim Walz, as a high-school teacher in Alliance, Nebraska, a little town in the western part of the state, decided to teach his geography class about genocide. This was in 1993, although the story linked above is from 2008, when Walz had recently been elected to Congress. And so:

Mr. Walz had already taught for a year in China, and he brought the world into his classroom in the form of African thumb pianos and Tibetan singing bowls. For the global geography class, he devised something far more ambitious than what the curriculum easily could have been — the identification and memorization of capitals, mountain ranges and major rivers. It was more ambitious, too, than a unit solely on the Holocaust of the sort many states have required.

“The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time,” Mr. Walz said in a recent interview, recalling his approach. “Students understood what had happened and that it was terrible and that the people who did this were monsters.

“The problem is,” he continued, “that relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path. You have to make the intellectual leap to figure out the reasons why.”

How did he do this?

For nine weeks through the winter and early spring that school year, through the howling blizzards and the planting of the first alfalfa on the plains, the class pored over data about economics, natural resources and ethnic composition. They read about civil war, colonialism and totalitarian ideology. They worked with reference books and scholarly reports, long before conducting research took place instantly online.

I’m already loving his approach as a teacher. I wonder how many kids were in the school. How lucky they were to have a teacher like this. At the end of the unit, he asked them to give their best guess where the next genocide would happen, offering them about a dozen choices. And what did they come up with?

Their answer was: Rwanda. The evidence was the ethnic divide between Hutus and Tutsis, the favoritism toward Tutsis shown by the Belgian colonial regime, and the previous outbreaks of tribal violence. Mr. Walz awarded high marks.

Well. We all know what happened the very next year.

This guy isn’t perfect, because no one is. But I’d vote for a teacher who came up with a lesson like this over a guy who peddled a memoir selling out his community.

Well, how was your weekend? Mine was busy, at least until I tried to bring a heavy box in from the front porch, struggled to get the screen door open, and fell on my ass right off the whole thing. I’m fine, but I took a bang on the ribcage and my hip. The good news is, I didn’t break anything, but I do have a garish bruise the size of my hand there. And it still hurts to move. It’ll be better in a few days, but it sucks to glimpse your mortality, doesn’t it?

Another killer week ahead, with one after that, and then Labor Day weekend, and after that — relief.

This might be the last day for this for a while:

Fortunately it was a great day for it.

I guess it was back at Barrington Elementary School, and it must have been early in the year, because we were talking about the just-concluded Olympic Games — this had to have been 1968, I guess — and one of my classmates asked, “Who won the Olympics?” The teacher explained that no one country “wins” the Olympics, that athletes compete under their own flags and win individual events, but the whole spectacle was about international fellowship and friendship.

Yeah, tell that to Dick Ebersol, amirite? As I recall, he was the one who instituted medal counts, first on NBC, which jingoistic editors later adopted for newspapers, and so on and so on.

Since we have to live with medal counts, here’s an unpopular opinion: I like it when American athletes, especially those who are favorites, are upset in their events. My all-time favorite might be when the American men’s basketball team had to settle for bronze in the 2004 games. And I realize it’s not the athletes losing that gives me this grim joy, but the insane, over-emphasis on American athletes, especially in the handful of prime-time sports that NBC shamelessly milks for pathos — gymnastics, swimming, track and a few others. Because I’ve spent my career in media, I can’t watch a closeup of Simone Biles sitting on the sideline without reverse-angling through the fourth wall. I know she’s surrounded by photographers and lenses capturing her every nose-scratch, and while I don’t want her to crash and burn — excuse me, for her Olympic dreams to vanish, I do want NBC to think, just for a few minutes, whether maybe another sport might be worthy of a little bit of attention.

Alan told me about kayak cross, a new sport this cycle, described by a writer for New York magazine as “a kind of mix between a ski slalom and white-water rafting and something you would see on one of the silly game shows that air on ABC in the summer where people risk bodily injury for small cash prizes. It is easily the most ‘should be narrated by a B-list comedian’ event at the Olympics. People in the crowd at Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium should have airhorns. These are the highest compliments I know how to give.” That is an excellent description; the videos are hilarious. Can we get a little comic relief between closeups of Simone Biles looking fierce and determined? Just a little?

I mean, I look at the clips that turn up in social-media feeds, and it’s often the weirdo sports like artistic swimming. There’s definitely an audience for this. You know what the most shared track-and-field clip was in recent days? The French pole vaulter who brought down the bar with his sizable penis, but did we see that on NBC? No. (OK, maybe we did. I didn’t watch every second in recent days. But I doubt it.)

Fortunately, other media outlets are still practicing journalism:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Washington Post (@washingtonpost)

You should watch that. It’s good.

Now I’m watching diving. One of the things I like about the Olympics is the way different sports reward different body types, and no group excels at flinging their bodies through the air like compact Asian people. These Chinese women are amazing; they barely make splashes.

In other news at this hour, Tim Walz! That was a good introductory speech. Still not taking anything for granted, because man, these Republicans get scarier every day.

Another scorcher of a weekend, but that’s summer, or at least it’s super-heated climate-change summer, eh? After a Thursday/Friday work thing, I jumped at the chance to do something I haven’t done for years, i.e. attend a simple county fair with friends. In this case, Monroe County, just south of Wayne.

What did we find? Animals, junk food, crybabies. The crybabies were in the county GOP tent:

Oh, sit on a pin, people. I found this goat far more compelling:

What fascinating animals goats are, with those horizontal pupils. I scritched a few bony skulls in my pass through their lodgings.

It was the last day of the fair, and the livestock auction was going, with cages full of chickens and rabbits selling for a couple hundred bucks, mostly. What a far cry from my time as the Ohio State Fair reporter, when there was a doping scandal around the grand champion steer. I’m sure I’ve talked about this before in this space, so I won’t bore longtime readers, but the basic outline was: Losers in the beef cattle competition accused the winner of doping, but blood tests showed the champion was clean. The following year more accusations were made about the winner, more testing showed no shenanigans, but when they slaughtered the animal and stripped off the hide, great globs of silicone gel fell from the carcass, and oh my but did hell break loose. Farm kids, improving their animal’s contours with plastic surgery of a sort? And here we thought those kids were innocents.

Today I spent my morning editing video — see Thursday/Friday work obligations — and drifted the afternoon away in a friend’s pool. Man, did I need that on another 90 degree day. And now I’m making a promising dinner from the NYT — this one — and planning my week ahead, which I devoutly hope will be less crazy.

How’s ’bout you?