On Mondays I “sleep late,” which is to say, I don’t set the alarm and wake up whenever. On Monday I woke at 6, tried to read for a while and drifted back to sleep, and learned my subconscious still has some tricks up her sleeve, i.e., a brand-new anxiety dream:

I’d invited two people to come to dinner, and had shopped and prepped food for all of us. They arrived, and before I could even shut the door, more people were standing on the front step, and apparently I’d invited them, too. This went on and on, and the house filled up with people expecting a meal. I never got around to serving anything, because issues kept arising in the party crowd — someone needed this moved from the second floor to the first, etc. It seemed to never end until I finally woke up, feeling very befuddled.

If only I’d invited Jesus. I understand he has a hack for feeding a multitude.

I’m well-acquainted with anxiety dreams, and have been working on them for some time. They started with the classic Test Dream (I’m seated for the final, and realize I’ve never attended this class). After my formal schooling ended, it became the Deadline Dream (an editor is expecting something, and I’ve done no reporting). My Feet Are Mired in Mud, self-explanatory in the central imagery. And so on. Now it’s the Dinner Party Dream.

Sigh. Very Monday, that one.

Jason T. posted this piece from the Bulwark on his socials, and I think it’s worth a read. Excerpt:

Biden’s biggest failure was that his theory of America was wrong.

He could have governed as a radical intent on destroying the populist project. This would have meant aggressively pursuing criminal charges against Trump and his confederates. It would have meant forgoing normal legislation in order to pursue broad, systemic change. Such a course would have been risky and — probably — unpopular.

Instead, Biden governed like a normal president in a normal moment. He pursued mostly popular, mostly incremental reforms. He forged bipartisan majorities. He passed a lot of legislation, most of it focused on concrete items to improve the lives of American citizens even—especially—in red states.

Biden’s belief was that the Trump moment was an aberration and that America could return to its liberal equilibrium if he governed normally and gave the Republican party space to heal itself and turn away from its authoritarian project.

Biden’s theory of the case was shredded by events.

Like many of you, I’ve been marinating in takes about Biden since That Book dropped. (May I say here that I have never been so happy to be quit of cable news as I have been this week, as I understand CNN has been shameless in flogging their star anchor’s work product.) And I share the frustration many of you have, that the coverage of a dying man who is no longer president has not even been matched at all by coverage of a senile man who is president. But at the same time, I don’t think we can ignore that covering for the president’s infirmity has gotten us here, where Democrats who haven’t even filed to run for office, any office, will be asked to somehow defend the work of people they don’t know, in events they had no control over. And no one is saying the obvious: Even a frail, doddering president with a competent staff is preferable to the one we have now, although you can argue that the original sin was for Biden to run in the first place. (See quoted paragraph, above.)

But Jason added something else that needs to be said. The Bulwark is a Substack vertical run by never-Trumpers who have moved incrementally to the left, or not moved at all, and now find themselves with more Democratic friends than Republican. He commented:

The reason people don’t like The Bulwark, of course, is that many of the people who contribute to it also built the current media and political climate which now afflicts the U.S. — they were part of various far-right think-tanks and publications and TV networks. We didn’t get to this dark reality in a vacuum; people like Bill Kristol and Mona Charen dragged the U.S. into this dark reality.

Exactly. Those of us who remember Mona Charen when she was shaking her finger at women who had sex outside of marriage still remember those columns, and ditto Kristol. I mean, I’m glad they’re resisting the current catastrophe, but if it ever ends, I don’t see themselves on our side. And we need to work this all the way out.

Of course, we can’t not blame Fox News. A nice takedown of our U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, here:

“Think about it: Omar wears a hijab,” said Pirro in 2019, referring to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota). “Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?” That remark drew condemnation from her own network.

After Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), for instance, expressed concerns that she might fall victim to a “political” prosecution after participating in a February “Know Your Rights” webinar for immigrants, Pirro attacked. “No, honey,” she said on the March 3 edition of “The Five.” “What it is, is it’s a prosecution based on — I think it’s 8 USC 119 — for obstruction of justice.” On the April 10 edition of “The Five,” she blamed Democrats for “keeping the illegals in the shadows and keeping the illegals illegal.” That was more charitable than the evaluation she articulated just over a week earlier, when she said of Democrats, “It’s a party that’s filled with hate.”

The punchline comes later, but it’s always satisfying to see Janine Winebox cut down to size.

But let’s end on a higher plane. Some of your Fort Wayne people might remember Zach Klein, who first crossed my radar when he won the Sterling Sentinel scholarship offered by my employer. He went to Wake Forest, and we later met up when he determined that he and I were the only two people in Fort Wayne with a blog. He later founded College Humor with his college roommates, sold it and has since gone on to more startups, including the one our own Deborah participated in, something about cabin-building.

Anyway. As I recall, Zach wrote about the subject of this very nice column, or at least the precipitating event, in his scholarship essay. It’s about the night his brother fell head-first out of a pickup that Zach was driving, as well as what came after:

When word got out that Noel was in a coma, our community showed up. There was a chapel in the hospital, and we held vigils for him. Mostly we sat silently with heads bowed, but occasionally someone would offer something up to the room. That’s when I heard the Serenity Prayer for the first time.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

I felt some relief, both an acknowledgment of my guilt and a merciful release from my community for whatever role I played. As a naive teenager who had little experience with the bigger world, it was an extraordinary glimpse into the human experience filled with error and pain, as well as a process—one that we have always needed and will always need—to forgive ourselves.

This prayer was different from the ones I had said over and over before. It was a tool, a reminder to help us frame burdens in a way that makes them easier to bear.

Noel’s brain swelling eventually reduced, and he emerged from his coma. He lived, but his life has never gotten easier. And I never returned to church or prayed again, either—yet I often think about the grace of the Serenity Prayer.

Anyway, I think you’ll like it, religious or not.

Time for me to get a move on.

Yard notes, for you gardeners: Our back yard, having been thoroughly ruined by some previous owner, has been a work in progress since we moved in, and I think we’ve brought it back about as far as we can, short of tearing down and rebuilding the garage where it should be, at the end of the driveway. (The owner moved it 90 degrees to gain a parking pad for their RV, we were told.) Along the way, Alan planted a climbing hydrangea along the back fence, where it dwelt in deep shade. Year after year, it would cover a smallish patch of the fence and do little more. A couple years back, Alan dug it up and replanted it against the side of the house, where it gets afternoon sun.

The motto for climbing hydrangea and other perennials, we’ve learned, is “first it sleeps, then it creeps, then it leaps.” The decade or so against the fence were its sleeping years. The first year on the house, creeping. But I’d say the Era of Leaping has fully arrived:

Not bad, little dude. Still to be revealed: The autumn-blooming clematis Alan put in this year to replace the honeysuckle that threw in the towel over the winter. Stay tuned.

How was everyone’s weekend? Mine? Can’t complain. Did some things, went out to a fancy dinner (32nd anniversary, Barda for you locals), stayed in with burgers the next night. A typical weekend, during which it was clear that Friday’s summery temperatures would give way to far springier ones, and they did. It was the benign touch of the storm system that devastated those to our south, and we’ll see what comes of that. The new FEMA director is being pretty open about the fact he doesn’t have a plan for hurricane season (which starts June 1) or anything else:

He also seemed to express surprise at the vast range of FEMA’s responsibilities, raising concerns among career officials about his ability to run the nation’s disaster-management agency. Richardson, who leads FEMA in an acting capacity, took over the complex agency last week.

“I feel a little bit like Bubba from ‘Forrest Gump,’ ” Richardson said, according to the video. “We’ve got hurricanes, we’ve got fires, we’ve got mudslides, we’ve got flash floods, we’ve got tornadoes, we’ve got droughts, we’ve got heat waves and now we’ve got volcanoes to worry about.”

Buck up, Dave. How hard can it be?

Then we had the Mexican yacht drifting into the Brooklyn Bridge. A car bomb at a fertility clinic. (He was opposed to “bringing people into the world against their will,” allegedly.) So many strange things happening, and it all feels very September 10, 2001 in the U.S. these days. Maybe it’s me. Happy week ahead, and the start of summer.

I was doing a practice lesson as part of this WSI class I don’t want to take but that’s a long story. The task was to teach the three kicks for treading water, and as I and my faux-students treaded away, I started telling a story that was so buried in my memory I don’t think I’d thought of it more than once since it happened. But unbidden, it surfaced and demanded to be told:

A bunch of us were at my friends’ cottage in the Upper Peninsula, and we were behaving like typical teenagers, which is to say, like idiots. We’d taken their boat out into the “big lake,” i.e., far from the channels of the Les Cheneaux Islands, well into Lake Huron, where the rollers are. We were doing something they called submarining, i.e. putting a bunch of people on the bow and gradually increasing the speed until the bow started going down, sending up an amusing spray and…I’m not sure how it was supposed to end, because we hit one of those rollers funny and a guy on the bow slipped off into the water.

This is northern Lake Huron, and as I recall it was June, late in the day, almost twilight. Lake Huron never really gets warm, and in June it is still quite cold. The kid was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and probably shoes of some sort. Did I mention we were all drinking? We were all drinking.

The guys who were leading this excursion, to their everlasting credit, did exactly what you should do in that situation. Neil immediately fixed on the guy in the water, pointing to his position. Paul scrambled for the swim ladder in the storage space. And Mark, at the wheel, put us in an immediate turn and roared back to the guy, expertly steering close without running him over, then decelerating, and we floated right up to him. Swim ladder was hooked on the side, and many arms reached down to help him climb back into the boat.

His first words, through his chattering teeth: “I’m sorry I dropped the schnapps.” Ha ha! Such a card! We’re having an adventure! We bundled him in what blankets were aboard, put him in the warmest spot (directly behind the front bench) and headed for home.

“And now we’ve been treading for about as long as that guy had to tread, in all his clothes, in very cold water,” I told my faux-students. “And that is why learning to tread water can save your life.” And honestly, it wasn’t until Wednesday evening, 50 years after the fact, that I realized how close we’d come to a fatal drowning incident, i.e., extremely. He could have easily gone straight to the bottom. I think your memory keeps that stuff buried for a good reason.

The three kicks for treading are scissors, breaststroke and rotary, i.e. eggbeater. Rotary is best. Also: Don’t do stupid boat tricks ever, but especially not there, especially not when the sun is going down. On the other hand, that kind of stupid fucking-around in boats often produces people who know how to drive boats. (Neil, Mark and Paul had done their share of stupid boat tricks before this.) My riding instructor grew up playing a game she and her siblings called Knock ‘Em Off, in which one person climbed on their horse, bareback and with no bridle, and the others tried to do anything short of touching the horse to get the mounted one to fall off. Flap a shirt in its face, run around yelling and waving arms, whatever. And that’s how my teacher learned to stick tight as a tick when a horse was misbehaving. I’m not sure that these stories have a point, but if they do, it’s that if you behave like this, don’t tell your mother.

You guys were discussing this piece in the comments, but if you don’t read the comments, Monica Hesse wrote an excellent column about the Diddy/Sean Combs trial, and here’s a gift link to read it.

Before I leave, three photos of our back yard.

March 26:

April 18:

This morning:

Happy weekend, all. Enjoy spring.

Like Alex, I need a new coping strategy for dealing with the news. I’m glad the weather has finally turned, because I need the next few months for a hard reset. More music, fewer headlines, maybe some time limiters for social media, with allowances for the work I need to do. At the same time, I freely admit to getting real pleasure from sneering at Secretary Croaky and the rest of the crew of idiots, but mostly as a way to mask my very real suspicion that all of us aren’t actually standing at a crossroads, but well beyond it, looking at a diminished America where an idiot buffoon like Donald Trump can become its leader. And all that lies ahead is more diminishment.

That’s not healthy. But it is reality.

Lately I’ve been allowing myself five minutes of our local talk station on my way to work at the pool, at an hour that coincides with Mitch Albom’s show. Yes, yes, still picking that scab, but it has shed some light on why his columns are so lame: He long ago ceased to be a newspaper guy and is now fully a talk-radio guy, where every extended bit of chitchat sounds like the worst elevator exchange you ever endured. The other day he and his sidekicks were talking about a matter of some local interest, the lawsuit filed by four former housekeepers for Smokey Robinson, alleging he was sexually abusive to all of them. What a terrible thing, the men agreed, that these women, who never called the police, could gang up on an 85-year-old music icon and ruin what should be the happy, last years of his life. Terrible, terrible. Why did they keep working for him, if he was so awful. Of course we can’t know the truth, no one does, but it’s a shame, just a shame. The man is 85 and has brought so much pleasure to so many. What a shame.

Here we have a talk-radio discussion in its purest form: Cliché, truism, assumption, stupidity, lack of curiosity, etc. And this is, increasingly, the way most public discourse is, and I need to step back. It’s like feeding at a trough of stale potato chips.

Things to consider: What will I write about here? What will we complain about here? Topics for further discussion.

So. What is today’s outrage? The Omaha mayor’s race was interesting, no? A moderate-ish Republican going for her fourth term in a bloody-red state loses…why?

As she campaigned for a fourth term, Ms. Stothert, who is the first woman to lead Omaha, emphasized her record on development and public safety. But she also waded into cultural issues by trying to make bathroom use and sports participation by transgender people a campaign issue. Mr. Ewing’s campaign has told local reporters that Ms. Stothert made baseless claims about his stance on transgender issues.

Ms. Stothert has told local reporters that she voted for Mr. Trump, though she has sometimes tried to distance herself from the president.

:::strokes chin::: Interesting.

Now let’s wait for the Democrats to fuck this up.

OK, I have work to do. Happy Wednesday.

Today I came downstairs dressed for my Mothers Day brunch date with Kate, and told Alan it was such a thrill to go someplace where I wasn’t wearing workout clothes or a swimsuit. I had on the excellent red lipstick she gave me for Christmas, a black jumpsuit and full eye makeup. Such a crazy getup in this dressed-down world.

It was an excellent brunch — mushroom flatbread for me, fish and chips for her — and a spicy margarita. And it would have been perfect, but just before I left, I learned that the motherfucking president of this stupid fucking country plans to accept the gift of a Qatari 747, and has greased the skids with his stupid motherfucking toadies who have all signed off on it, and I’m sorry, but it pissed me off. Excuse my language.

I will say it now: I cannot wait for this asshole to die. His casket will float to the surface of whatever golf course his wife decides to bury him in, the ground will be so soaked with urine. And then we can drag it into the street to be set on fire before shooting what’s left of him into deepest space with a warning note in all the languages of the world and some digital space language we can invent, that whoever finds it should do the same, and then whatever asteroid it lands on should be targeted by a nuke and blasted into so many shards that not one shred of his DNA should remain.

Not that I am terribly angry. If I were, I’d suggest we do the same to his entire issue, including FSWOUS, Melania.

How in the world is this OK. HOW? The limits on presidential gifts aren’t that high. I know others have ignored them in the past — Ronald Reagan alone collected enough expensive horses to hold his own rodeo — but they never belonged to him, and when he died, the survivors went to retirement arrangements, as far as I can tell. But even a blooded horse is not a half-billion-dollar jet, no doubt equipped with state-of-the-art listening devices, all for a man who’s spent the last week gibbering nonsense about dolls and pencils as he gilds the White House like a fucking casino and you can tell I’m upset because I’m writing run-on sentences.

Grr.

How about some pretty-pretty pictures. I almost did a Saturday Morning Market, but I was too busy juggling eggs and bedding plants.

Now get to work, plants. It’s almost mojito season, and I’m looking forward to some shishito peppers on the grill:

Have a good week. Don’t fly in or out of Newark, or maybe anywhere, huh?

Some years ago, I was kicked out of a local moms group on Facebook. It was at the very height of Facebook popularity among normies, and all sorts of drama was kicking off there. There was the woman whose marriage fell apart over the course of a morning after she sent up the alarm that her husband was missing, then revised it an hour later: No, he had apparently spent the night with a stripper, everybody stand down. That was a good one. My banishment doesn’t even compare, but it went like this:

The school district announced it would provide free FluMist flu vaccines for any child whose parents wanted it. Permission slips, etc., nothing out of the ordinary, but it set off a huge outcry on this particular mom group, who all seemed to post in all caps about VIRUS SHEDDING and BIG PHARMA PROFITEERING and WHY WEREN’T WE NOTIFIED and ISN’T THIS A VIOLATION OF MEDICAL ETHICS, and THESE COMPANIES WILL STOP AT NOTHING, etc. At the height of this back-and-forth a new voice parachuted in, a woman who said she had honey for sale from her own bees, and that this honey had “anti-viral and anti-fungal properties,” and that it could be a natural, organic, healthy way to protect your child from influenza. The clamor immediately shifted from BIG PHARMA to OMG DO YOU DELIVER and various forms of SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.

And then along came me, who wondered why it was evil for a pharmaceutical company to offer a vaccine, but OK for this lady to sell her honey. Well. The honey lady complained to the admins, and I was bounced from not only this group, but another that the same admin ran.

“And that,” my friend Dustin said at the time, “is when you got your teardrop tattoo, right?” Ha ha ha.

I could not have known at the time, in the innocent era of the Obama administration, that these women were proto MAHA moms. The anti-vax movement was making itself known, but they didn’t have a spokesman other than Jenny McCarthy and some Hollywood twits, certainly not an actual Kennedy. And that Kennedy, HHS Secretary Croaky, made all their dreams come true this week when he nominated Casey Means as the U.S. Surgeon General. Means is being identified as a doctor, and she did graduate from med school (Stanford! Impressive!) but never finished her residency, which my doctor friend tells me makes her not-quite-a-doctor. His text:

You don’t become a physician in medical school. Med school is a hazing ritual that earns you the right to become a physician over the ensuing years of residency (+ fellowship, etc.) if you survive.

Whatever. Apparently Means became disenchanted with otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat, for you people who don’t speak Medical) and dove headfirst into so-called functional medicine, which many consider pseudoscientific, and I know you will be astonished to learn that she is very suspicious of these “vaccines,” and is cut from the same cloth as Croaky, i.e. it’s the pollution and the seed oils and blah blah blah. And now she’s on deck to become the nation’s top doctor. Wikipedia:

(Means’) book’s central claim is that a single mechanism which the authors call “Bad Energy”, which they describe as a uniquely common form of mitochondrial dysfunction caused by improper lifestyles (contrasted with scientifically-established, genetics-based mitochondrial diseases), which causes disorders as diverse depression, anxiety, acne, infertility, insomnia, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, as well as “most other conditions”, because “it can show up in different cell types” and thus causes different symptoms.

As I believe we’ve discussed here about a million times, I have no problem with eating better, and I believe a healthy diet will improve one’s own health, but I don’t recall this being kept secret by the AMA. In fact, I think they’re the ones who are always handing us a copy of this or that diet on our way out of the exam room. And those of us who remember the Obama years also remember the conservative response when Michelle Obama dared to suggest school lunches could be healthier, and that exercise was a good thing.

(Cul-de-sac: A friend sent me a years-old story about a school lunch staple of our youth — Johnny Marzetti. This story goes into the rise and fall of Johnny Marzetti, best described as sort of a baked ziti, but more downmarket. Apparently it has nearly disappeared from school cafeterias, driven out in part by the nutritional reforms pushed by Mrs. Obama. I had NO idea.)

Conservatives bitched up a storm over those reforms, and now they’ll be obligated to support a quack who believes Bad Energy is what causes illness. Tell that to the sick folks in Kentucky and West Virginia, you cowards. Offer them a jar of honey instead. It’s delicious on toast.

Best social-media joke I heard this week: I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the orcas now have two F-18 Hornets.

The weekend awaits, doesn’t it? Think I’ll clean three bathrooms and go for a bike ride. You do what you like.

One thing you get from a pain-in-the-ass head cold is a good excuse to skip early-morning workouts. I laid in bed this morning, scanning the news and listening to the foghorns on the far-away lake; apparently some warm air is in our forecast, and it was already making things murky on the water. Then I picked up my iPad and learned Kari Lake, the new head of Voice of America, has found a “content provider” to fill the VOA airwaves now that she’s fired the whole staff.

One America News. It is to weep.

I’m old enough to remember when Radio Free Europe was something a different America was so proud of it created ads to tell other Americans about. Like this one. I found it while searching for a similar one I remember: A peasant family in a gray hovel, babushkas on the women, everyone huddled around the probably-forbidden radio, one ear cocked to its speaker and the other listening for storm troopers outside, as the voice on it speaks in a foreign language, and then: “ze Drifters…on Broadvay.” The music from the tinny speaker washes over the faces, and you’re there with them, imagining these beaten-down people hearing this song about faraway America, not understanding it, but somehow understanding anyway. It was…stirring, in the best way.

Now, they’ll get Matt Gaetz and Chanel Rion. Man, this country. Such a steep slide.

What else is going on? The conclave! :::makes cheering-crowd sounds::: Perhaps you’ve heard about Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, one of the conclave. His name alone has made him a great favorite in St. Peter’s Square, at least among the Americans, who find it amusing. What I don’t find amusing? This:

Jerusalem CNN — Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, cuts an unmistakable figure in the dark corridors of the ancient, stone patriarchate in this troubled corner of the world. He moves quickly, in long, deliberate strides, the seams of his black cassock billowing like a swimmer’s stroke ahead of his arrival.

Block that metaphor! Sounds like someone at CNN recently attended a How to Write Good seminar, and took the wrong lesson home.

OK, my biggest deadline of the last couple weeks is behind me, but more remain, so I gotta skedaddle. Happy hump day, all.

I was almost feeling sorry for NPR and the CPB until this morning, en route to the grocery at 7:45 a.m. because that’s how I do things, and I heard some chirpy report from a Washington correspondent, who made reference to the presidunce’s talk of “annexing Canada.” Her words, not his.

And I thought, shit, just stick a fork in this outfit now. Let them go under. I’d rather listen to music.

This is what we’re talking about when we talk about “sanewashing.” Canada is not available for annexation. It isn’t an unincorporated suburban area adjacent to a growing city, it’s a sovereign nation. And it’s pretty clear it intends to stay a sovereign nation. Making Canada part of the U.S., or attempting to do so, would be an act of war. It would require military troops, gunfire and death. If Cheetolini won’t stop talking about it, you have to report it. But report it correctly. Use the English language, where words have actual meanings.

Remember when NPR was good? I do. Now it’s like you can identify the big funders by the news budget. Oh, a boring story about wind energy? They’re pleasing an environmental nonprofit, hoping for a grant renewal. An endless piece on diversity efforts of no great consequence, in a place or field you don’t care about? Someone’s checking a box for their year-end goal list. Which is to say, I miss the personal essays, offbeat stories and other weirdness you used to hear on All Things Considered and Morning Edition, or the stuff they used to call “driveway moments.” They don’t do those anymore. There are no driveway moments.

That said, I do not miss Susan Stamberg’s stupid cranberry relish recipe at Thanksgiving, and in fact I don’t miss Susan Stamberg at all. If smugness had a voice, it was hers.

I woke up with a cold this weekend. I never get colds during the warm weather, except when I do. Thought it was allergies at first, but three days of antihistamines haven’t made a dent, so I suppose it’s a cold. (It’s not Covid; I tested.) So it was with a particular grumpiness that I noted the juxtaposition of two stories in Sunday’s NYT. The first, a story about the breakdown of the news ecosystem in one California town, Oakdale:

First the nearby newspapers shrank, and hundreds of local reporters in the region became handfuls. Then came the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, and the pandemic; suddenly cable networks long deemed trustworthy were peddlers of fake news, on the right and the left.

…Now, in place of longtime TV pundits and radio hosts, residents turn to a new sphere of podcasters and online influencers to get their political news. Facebook groups for local events run by residents have replaced the role of local newspapers, elevating the county’s “keyboard warriors” to roles akin to editors in chief.

..As local news outlets shrank throughout the Central Valley in the 2010s, Facebook groups dedicated to local events started popping up in their place. And for years, they were harmless. But that changed in 2020.

What this story describes — misinformation, followed by attempts to correct/control it, followed by the flowering of even more Facebook groups, with names like UNCENSORED or UNFILTERED — is pretty much what’s happened in my own community. On the one hand, you could say it represents healthy pushback to narratives some find infuriating. On the other, it also represents the death of fact-based media. Here in Detroit, there are people who listen to police scanners all day and night, and report on what they hear on various social channels. Sometimes this is useful. Sometimes, when it’s slow, they throw in their own racist analysis. This is not useful.

The second story was pegged to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s latest real-estate purchase: A $23 million house in Washington D.C. This follows his Tahoe house, his Hawaii house, and god knows what other houses. He has become one of the richest people in the world off a technology that has ruined the news media and leads the people of Oakdale, California to fly at one another’s throats.

What a legacy.

I cannot wait for this cold to run its course. Have a good week, all.

Mercy me, it’s Thursday already? That it is, and I completely missed on the midweek blog. Sorry about that.

However, others have been gathering string on my behalf. On someone’s behalf, anyway. While I strive to find the top of my desk under a shifting stack of work, please enjoy:

Eric Zorn, a Chicagoan, justly praises Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s stirring call to action, delivered in New Hampshire on Sunday. You probably saw piece of it here and there, and if you didn’t, rest assured: It was a good’un:

Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption, but I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box.

They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact — because we have no alternative but to do just that — that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors. … I’m telling you what I’m willing to do, and that’s fight for our democracy, for our liberty, for the opportunity for all of our people to live lives that are meaningful and free.

Being in Chicago, he was able to report the Tribune’s, and the Illinois GOP’s, ridiculous reaction:

The Illinois Republican Party rushed to the fainting couch in a news release Monday headlined, “Pritzker Calls For Violence Toward Republicans.”

JB Pritzker’s attempt to woo New Hampshire Democrats as he barrels towards the 2028 Democrat primary was full of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric. Pritzker’s obsession, to insult and to chastise President Trump, showed forcefully as he stoked the crowd in calling for political violence against Republicans.

The Tribune reported:

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, reposted a clip of Pritzker’s speech on social media and asked, “Are you trying to inspire a 3rd assassination attempt on my dad?” And deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller in Washington also criticized the remarks, saying they “could be construed as inciting violence.”

“The destruction of property sits directly adjacent to the — to attacks on humans, physical attacks,” said Miller, who also cited the past assassination attempts on Trump.

Easy there, Grand Old Paranoids. Fighting with “every microphone and megaphone that we have” is call for protests and rhetoric, not a call to take up bear spray, baseball bats and flagpoles, as those who answered the call from Dear Leader did on Jan. 6, 2021.

When you’ve pissed off both Don Jr. and Stephen Miller, you know you’ve hit a nerve. Keep it up, governor.

Eric’s Substack is pretty good, btw. He publishes twice a week, with the Chicago-heavy content going in the Tuesday edition, the paid one. Thursday’s is friendlier to non-Chicagoans.

Bonus Zorn: Exploring the origins of the word “tilt” as a synonym for malfunction, and its roots in pinball, he quotes from “Wired,” Bob Woodward’s book:

In his 1984 book “Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi,” author Bob Woodward described the coked-up actor at one point as “like a pinball machine on tilt, out of control.”

The quote made me wince, because it’s such a perfect illustration of what a leaden writer Woodward is. I remember reading “Wired” and thinking, how can a book about a comedian be so unfunny? FWIW, a pinball machine on tilt is not “out of control,” it’s dead. Activating the tilt sensors makes the machine freeze and lets the ball roll out of play. But the book was full of passages like that. Probably the worst was Woodward on the chizborger-chizborger sketch, an SNL classic, which he lays out in such excruciating detail that it isn’t even mildly amusing.

In other news, I recently became aware of a publication called Michigan Enjoyer. Hmm, what’s this, I thought, and clicked on their About page, where I read:

Michigan Enjoyer is Michigan media for those who relish the beauty of life here and are tired of apologizing for it.

Wha-? Huh? As one who enjoys the beauty of life here and has never once apologized for it, or even thought I should, I read on:

An antidote to the boring, biased, and out-of-touch local media, we’re here to breathe vitality back into a state that used to overflow with it. You “problematic” Michiganders too busy building to be depressed and offended—you’re our driving force.

Oh. OK. If you scratch someone upset about the boring, biased and out-of-touch local media, nine times out of 10 you’ll find a right-winger, and whaddaya know, I’m right. Here’s a recent headline:

DTW Is the Democrat Dream

Subhed: It’s an ultra-safe surveillance state full of high-end luxuries, so why do we all hate being there?

What follows is a glimpse into the mind of an editorial team who thinks some people go around apologizing for enjoying the beauty of life in Michigan. While I despise the early-2000s habit of dissecting blogs line-by-line, once known as “fisking,” I must say this column was just one jaw-dropper after another:

Detroit Metropolitan Airport is a leftist utopia. Everything is pre-packaged, arbitrary rules are strictly enforced, and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s voice even blares over the loudspeakers.

That’s the lead. First of all, it’s a what? And how does pre-packaged everything make it so? At a time when having the wrong tattoo and a Chicago Bulls cap can get you sent to a concentration camp, is this the time to whine about arbitrary rules from a conservative corner? As for Benson’s voice, he’s objecting to a recording played every so often in recent weeks, reminding travelers that the Real ID deadline is absolutely coming for real this time, and they should be mindful. We heard it when we went to New Orleans. I don’t recall it being all that frequent, or in any way blaring.

I should stop here to confess my prejudice: I like our airport. I don’t like that it’s on the other side of the county, but I can live with that. The entrances and exits make sense, there are plenty of restrooms, moving sidewalks, a tram, lots of food choices and it’s never less than reasonably clean. But most important, it’s a hub. You can fly nonstop from Detroit to Tokyo, for crying out loud. Spend 20 years of your life in someplace like Fort Wayne, and then come back to me with your complaints. In that city, the choice was always to either pay significantly more to book a vacation flight out of there, or save the extra dough by driving to Indianapolis or Chicago, which isn’t so bad when you’re departing, full of we’re-on-vacation high spirits. When you return, tired and road-weary, you now face a 110- or 150-mile drive to your house, and that part sucks.

But it’s the nature of this guy’s complaints that blow my mind:

(Airports) are always regulated by county- or city-port authorities and almost always located within or adjacent deep blue urban hubs. They even have special police forces and federal TSA security apparatchiks enforcing terminal access.

…When faced with overt government regulation, travelers are forced through a slightly humiliating screening process, as frequent flyers pay for quicker security sweeps.

…The McNamara and Evans terminals look less like airports and more like suburban malls. The PGA Tour Shop, Johnston & Murphy, Estee Lauder, Brookstone, and iStore Express. These are global brands for a super-striver consumer. But it’s a command economy with a neoliberal flavor. Travelers are captured and repeatedly price gouged due to a lack of competition.

Welcome to every single airport in the country, except for the smaller ones like Fort Wayne, which probably doesn’t have a Johnston & Murphy, Estée Lauder, etc. The big thing everyone mentions about FWA is this: A crew of greeters offers warm cookies to arrivals. This is nice! I’d love a cookie. It would sustain me on my 150-mile final drive to my destination.

But so many questions have I! The terminals “look less like airports and more like suburban malls?” What should airports look like, because in between those mall stores and restaurants are gates with windowed walls where you can see planes. Would you prefer a three-sided shed, a wind sock and a crew that starts the planes by pulling on the propeller, the pilot in a leather helmet giving a thumbs-up from the cockpit? I prefer the modern version, even if it comes with a neoliberal flavor. And price-gouging? People don’t shop at the airport for bargains — it’s on the other side of security. You shop there because you forgot to pack something, or you’re bored, or you have money to burn. Expect to pay a premium for this.

Then he bitches again about Real ID, claiming “what it really appears to be is a state (and federal) cash grab to force adults over the age of 18 to get brand new state ID cards that are somehow harder to falsify.” Why do we have this law? Because the 9/11 Commission recommended it. It was passed by Congress and signed into law by, anyone? George W. Bush. Full implementation has been delayed now for 20 years. If it were a cash grab, it’s a pretty shitty one. But I’d point out to this writer that it’s no more onerous than the requirements they want to enshrine in the SAVE Act, the one that will require new voters to prove their citizenship to register. 9/11 actually happened. But non-citizens voting is vanishingly rare.

Oh, well. Some people will never be happy. I’ll offer this miserable traveler one pro tip: TSA Pre is the single best $80 I ever spent, even factoring in the hassle of having to be fingerprinted. It’s good for five years, and every time I fly, which isn’t often, I’m glad I did it. But then, I’m a Democrat. And I like having a cocktail before I board, even if it is overpriced.

The last thing I’ll say about Michigan Enjoyer: It’s the latest stop on the downward spiral of Charlie LeDuff’s career. And he’s doing the same thing to them that he did to Deadline Detroit: Cut/paste his column into his own social media, thereby depriving his publisher of the click. What a guy.

OK, it’ll be Friday in 24 hours and I still have work to do. Enjoy the weekend, and let’s hope there’s fewer chores next week.

Certain decisions must be made with one’s own mental health in mind. And so I am consciously choosing not to even furrow my brow over the fact the president of the United States chose a blue suit over a more diplomatic black to wear to Pope Francis’ funeral. That he’s a boor is not news, so why would anyone expect him to start paying attention to protocol now? Besides, the one he wore to this papal audience…

…may not fit him anymore. And no one would prefer the ridiculous white-tie getup he sported at Buckingham Palace:

Ah, memories. That was the state visit where he told the queen his children were interested in a “next-generations” meeting with William and Harry. For maintaining her composure when confronted with this request, I think we should put Elizabeth’s face on the $20 bill. And Pope Francis? Fast-tracked to sainthood.

I said at the time of the papal audience that Ivanka looked like she got her headpiece from a Goth Bride package at Spirit Halloween. Perhaps, as an observant Jew, she felt she didn’t need to wear a mantilla, but that veil is ridiculous. The point of covering one’s head in a religious setting differs from faith to faith, but in general, it’s about covering it, somehow, not sporting a fun piece of netting on the back of your bean.

Back to the papal funeral: At least he didn’t wear a red tie.

Thanks to all you Hoosiers who offered interesting tidbits on Zion Lutheran. It jogged a memory for me, of going to their school for a story, and I can’t remember anything about the story, but I do remember the school. (I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this here before, but can’t find it in the archives. Apologies if so.) As others noted, it mainly served neighborhood children, and the neighborhood was decidedly lower-income. I was there through lunch, which was a plain hot dog and a scoop of baked beans. Nothing wrong with that, and the kids didn’t seem to mind it, but then the principal said, “We used to have silent lunch, but we recently changed the policy.” “Say what?” I replied. “What is ‘silent lunch?'”

Basically, it’s exactly what it sounds like: Children are forbidden from speaking during lunch. They get a short recess after they’re done, but while they’re seated at lunch tables? SILENCE. That struck me as cruel, and I use that word deliberately; socializing over food is a deeply human experience in every culture on the globe, and combined with the prison-like meal it really rubbed me the wrong way.

“Do you talk to other people when you’re seated together at a meal?” I asked, probably bitchy-like. Yes, but, if they don’t have to be quiet, they might leave food uneaten or get distracted or whatever, and that would be terrible. It never occurred that learning to talk and eat at the same time might be a skill worth, you know, teaching.

Julie’s recollection that a stab at “classical education” flamed out there was interesting. That is, of course, the latest trend in charter-school education. One has been floating around hereabouts, threatening/promising to open “soon,” but I just looked at their website and they haven’t promised anything since 2023, so I’m guessing the flame has gone out.

And yes, it was “cruciform” that Timbo was looking for, not cuneiform. Every day I see evidence that every editor at a newspaper that isn’t the NYT or WP has either been driven from the building or so beaten into submission that they just go to meetings all day and wave all sorts of shit through. It’s depressing.

And a final note: I did my grocery shopping today and noted prices are up sharply. Hmm.

OK, let’s see what horrors await us this week. Will we deport more children with cancer? Tune in and find out.