A burden, lifted.

Not a great weekend, but a productive one. Taxes, filed. (REFUND!) FAFSA, updated. (LESS EXPECTED FAMILY CONTRIBUTION!) And after it was all over, I stood up and put my hands on my hips and felt infrastructure.

I should explain. Six months ago I started adding side planks to my workout. One minute each side, three times a week at the end of the session. Today? Infrastructure. So y’all run out and start doing some side planks. Your waistline will thank you.

Seriously, though, there’s something about shoveling this great chore into the Outbox that just feels like springtime. A few years ago, I filed and immediately went on Craigslist and bought a Tiffany chain — this one, although not this one — from a woman, exchanging goods for cash in a Costco parking lot. I wear that chain several times a month and don’t regret a penny of the $75 I paid for it. (“My grandmother bought it for me, and I just…don’t like it,” she said. Excellent. She wasn’t the plain-silver-chain type, anyway.)

And why do I do the taxes? Because Alan does stuff like paint the dining room and bleach the mold out of the washer, which was his weekend project.

There was some fun, too: The Deadly Vipers played Friday night at the Hamtramck Music Festival. They were the last act at one of the venues, and the crowd seemed to dig it. I shot a bunch of hail mary pix with my phone, and they were the usual mixed bag. I was trying to capture the moshing, which was too close to the band for my comfort, but that’s how it goes in bars:

moshing

And then every so often you got a fun moment. BUDWEISER:

beerdrinker

We also watched “Foxcatcher” because I was too tired to go out Saturday night, and it was, what’s the word? Disappointing. Tonally self-important, and the story was just sort of boring. Vanessa Redgrave, meanwhile, has three scenes as a nearly-dead WASP dowager, and manages to steal every one. Because she’s Vanessa Redgrave.

And now the winds have finally shifted and a breeze is blowing out of the southwest, and by Wednesday we are promised 50 degrees. Mirabile dictu.

So, did you catch the president’s speech at Selma? If you have only one thing to read about it, make it this. It was such a great speech; I can’t wait to see what the lunatics find to hate about it.

Comic relief: Tom and Lorenzo and a million pictures of “fashion clown Kim Kardashian,” who looks incredibly weird. (That said, I’m adding some blonde chunks to my hair the next touch-up I get, because why the hell not.)

Seems a good note to start Monday. Enjoy yours.

Posted at 12:17 am in Current events, Same ol' same ol' |
 

34 responses to “A burden, lifted.”

  1. Dexter said on March 9, 2015 at 1:01 am

    Vanessa Redgrave. She’s who I named my daughter for 37 years ago. 🙂

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  2. Dexter said on March 9, 2015 at 3:58 am

    Here’s a follow up to a topic from last week.
    http://www.freep.com/story/life/shopping/georgea-kovanis/2015/03/09/handle-unwanted-kiss/24501425/

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  3. Jeff Borden said on March 9, 2015 at 8:07 am

    I wonder if I will live long enough to understand the celebrity of Kim Kardashian.

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  4. beb said on March 9, 2015 at 8:07 am

    I stood up and put my hands on my hips and felt infrastructure.

    Andn I felt “WFT”?

    I’ve heard other compare the President’s speech to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I’ve also heard people speaking of 2016 saying thart much they’ll miss the Obama’s in the White House.

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  5. beb said on March 9, 2015 at 8:08 am

    That’s “WTF” Damn that auto-correct…

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  6. Suzanne said on March 9, 2015 at 9:03 am

    I tried to do a side plank this morning. I failed due, I suppose, to bad infrastructure.

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    • nancy said on March 9, 2015 at 9:12 am

      Lean on me when you’re not strong and I’ll be your friend.

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  7. coozledad said on March 9, 2015 at 9:58 am

    I’ve heard other compare the President’s speech to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

    There will not be another president this smart or decent in our lifetime. We are lucky to have witnessed it. Enjoy it while it lasts.

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    • nancy said on March 9, 2015 at 10:01 am

      I tend to agree, but I am astonished at the anti-matter version of Obama that lives on right-wing news sites and blogs. He hates America, mainly. How can ANYone read that speech and come away with that impression? How willfully stupid do you have to be?

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  8. coozledad said on March 9, 2015 at 10:35 am

    And it’s the people foaming at the mouth about him who have thrown their lot in with neo-secessionists.

    The US has to get about the business of that “United” part. I think a good start would be renaming the Edmund Pettus bridge after John Lewis, or ripping up those bronze statues of traitors in pimple-ass Confederate towns.

    It’s no coincidence that every municipality decorated with that rubbish is a you ain’t going nowhere hellhole.

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  9. Julie Robinson said on March 9, 2015 at 10:50 am

    Amen to that, Cooz. There is no sane reason for the bridge, or any other monument, building, or highway, to bear the name of racist death-bringers.

    I do the taxes too and I enjoy it. Maybe that’s why I work in finance. These things confuse my better half, who is a much smarter person than I, but whose mind works in non-linear ways.

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  10. Sue said on March 9, 2015 at 10:50 am

    Accidentally watched The Last Man on Earth on Saturday, and then watched it on purpose last night. I hope it can maintain its bizarre humor throughout, although what happened at the end of last night’s episode was entirely predictable.

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  11. Jeff Borden said on March 9, 2015 at 10:54 am

    I loathed George W. Bush with a fierce passion, but even so, I gave him credit for his efforts to blunt anti-Muslim rhetoric in the days after 9/11, his efforts to fight AIDS in Africa and his generally benign view toward immigration. I still think he’s the worst president of my lifetime and unleashed the destruction in the Middle East with his stupid Oedipal complex. I’m just willing to say he did a few good things.

    Why can’t those who hate Obama at least give him some credit? We might well have tumbled into a full-blown depression if not for his efforts. General Motors might be gone. Millions of Americans have some kind of health care coverage thanks to him including many poor whites in those blood red states.

    Meanwhile, anyone paying attention to the fast-rising tea doucher out of Arkansas, Tom Cotton, who has managed to obtain 47 senatorial signatures for a letter he’ll send to Iran saying any deal signed with Obama expires with his president? WTF? It was bad enough for Boehner to allow Bibi Netayahu to do his campaign speech in Congress, but this is even worse. The teabillies won’t be satisfied, I guess, until bombs are bursting and American troops are bleeding in a war somewhere. The bastards.

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  12. Basset said on March 9, 2015 at 11:41 am

    We had our taxes done this weekend, neither of us has a numbers head so it’s best to leave it to someone who knows what they’re doing.

    Fragment of an alternate version of “Dixie” I heard as a kid down in Martin County, anyone know more of the words?

    “I wish I was in the land of traitors/Rattlesnakes and alligators/Run away, run away, run away, Dixieland…”

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  13. Deborah said on March 9, 2015 at 11:50 am

    I tried a side plank too. The pain!

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  14. Jolene said on March 9, 2015 at 12:11 pm

    As I said a couple of days ago, I am already in mourning about Obama’s not-too-distant departure from office. So many things to miss: the intelligence, the wit, the coolness, the beautiful wife with the gorgeous clothes, the increasingly attractive young women who are his well-behaved daughters, the cute dogs, the effort to provide health insurance for all Americans and to avoid war with Iran, the recognition that allowing climate change to proceed unimpeded will bring catastrophe . . .

    Like you, Nancy, I can’t understand the ideas that people have about him. As I’ve said before, if any of us had a son who had graduated with honors from Columbia and Harvard, established an apparently loving marriage with a beautiful and kind-hearted woman, and been a good father to his children, we’d be intensely proud, whatever his professional achievements. That he’s dedicated himself to making life better for millions, largely avoiding scandal or corruption, is really about as much as one could hope for a human to be or do.

    To have everything about him–his intelligence, his motives, his integrity, his very identity–called into question is really more than I can bear. I hate the believers in the anti-matter Obama, not only for what they have done to him but also for the things they have led me to feel about my fellow Americans. How can they, really, how can they?

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  15. alex said on March 9, 2015 at 12:49 pm

    Right-wingers hate this country more than anyone but are always the first to call others’ patriotism into question, and the disconnect between reality and the anti-matter Obama isn’t so hard to fathom when you consider that these are the same people who believe the earth is six thousand years old, who blow money on Glenn Beck’s gold coins and who think American foreign policy decisions need to be framed around the coming Rapture. These are people so heavily invested in their prejudices that no amount of truth is going to change their minds, and you can hardly blame Fox News for catering to them. After all, separating fools from their money is part of the American way, the America we all know and love.

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  16. Jeff Borden said on March 9, 2015 at 1:31 pm

    Sheesh, Alex, that is so depressingly insightful.

    My work rewriting copy for the international web site of Handelsblatt has given me a new respect for multiple political parties. Part of the reason the GOP cannot govern any longer is that it has been taken over by the craziest elements of its right-wing base and they’ve destroyed the central conceit that the Republican Party is the party of competence and business. If we had more parties, these loons could gravitate to the American version of France’s National Front or Germany’s Pegida. Liberals like me would be drawn to the Greens or the Far Left style of parties and could wash our hands of the centrists who want the Democratic Party to look more like the Republican Party.

    Watching the maneuverings in Germany and understanding how the Grand Coalition between the center-left and the center-right gets things done makes our own dysfunction all the more stark.

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  17. Jolene said on March 9, 2015 at 1:43 pm

    Meanwhile, some
    fraternity members at the University of Oklahoma
    seem to have missed out on this past weekend’s message of racial comity.

    After a video of them singing a song about how there’d never be black members of their group, including the word nigger and a reference to lynching, was released, the national organization shut down the OU chapter, forcing all the members to move out of the house by tomorrow night.

    To his great credit, David Boren, the university president is doing all the right things. He participated in an early morning vigil concerning this incident, held a terrific press conference in which he was very clear about the university’s unwillingness to tolerate such behavior, and has said that, following an inverstigation, there may be expulsions.

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  18. Jolene said on March 9, 2015 at 1:55 pm

    Here’s a statement from the university president. And here’s a statement from the national office of the fraternity.

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  19. brian stouder said on March 9, 2015 at 2:17 pm

    I think a good start would be renaming the Edmund Pettus bridge after John Lewis, or ripping up those bronze statues of traitors in pimple-ass Confederate towns. Both of those idea would indeed make an excellent start. This will sound like a joke, but truly – some years ago – we were motoring back north from visiting Mickey Mouse, and stopped at Andersonville, Georgia, to see the big United States POW memorial there (which covers POWs from all American wars, including the Civil War). It is a very affecting place, which directly addresses the cruelty and inhumanity inherent in war, and especially in prison camps of wars….and if you go into the town of Andersonville, right in the center circle of the place, is a towering monument to the memory of the “misunderstood” commander of the Andersonville prison camp, Henry Wirz – who is one of the very few Confederate leaders tried and hung for war crimes, after the war (Nathan Bedford Forrest would have been another candidate, I’d say – but we digress). I stared at the monument for a long moment, with my mouth agape, as the sun was setting. Honest to Goodness, about that time Pam came over, and our son had wondered off – and I hesitated to call his name, as his name is Grant(!!). But just as quickly as we’d lost track of him, there he was across the way, and we loaded up and trundled further north.

    One other semi-non-sequitur; I cannot recommend Harold Holzer’s new book about Lincoln and the press (Lincoln and the Power of the Press) strongly enough. It is fascinating to me, as all these larger-than-life editors and publishers are literally inventing national media, with all the most modern stuff of the age (chiefly high speed presses, emerging telegraphic links, and workable business models), just like today. And indeed, the naked partisanship and no-holds-barred approach to political coverage is positively nothing new in America. I will say that it is not quite reassuring, given how things climaxed in the 19th century(!), but indeed it does lend perspective to today’s version of congress/media/opinion/money-power

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  20. adrianne said on March 9, 2015 at 2:48 pm

    Having engaged in some fruitless back and forth with an Obama hater on my Facebook page (he’s a former elementary teacher who’s so virulently anti-abortion that he’s accepted all the rhetoric about the Kenyan pretender), I have to tell you, there’s no debating those suffering from Obama derangement syndrome. Obama’s speech on Saturday brought me to tears, but there was part of me cheering him on with the obvious subtext to Giuliani and the other morons who dare to question Obama’s patriotism. To paraphrase Key and Peele, that subtext is, “take that, mfers.”

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  21. brian stouder said on March 9, 2015 at 3:08 pm

    Here’s the screaming banner headline (for this moment) from the Fox News bee hive –

    White House, NYT leave Bushes out of lead photos from Selma march

    That’s about as close as I can imagine – to applause from the right-wing side of the peanut gallery

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    • nancy said on March 9, 2015 at 3:11 pm

      The crop, explained.

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  22. coozledad said on March 9, 2015 at 3:17 pm

    Treason.
    http://www.balloon-juice.com/2015/03/09/dont-call-it-treason/

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  23. Deborah said on March 9, 2015 at 6:52 pm

    I am completely and totally disgusted by those frat boys (and accompanying girls) who sang that chant on the bus in Tulsa. Who are these people, literally, I want to know their name, I want to know where they live, I want to know who their parents are and what their mom’s and dad’s do for a living. Out those fuckers, that’s what I say. Every single one of them who participated. Especially the guy leading the chant who can clearly be seen on the second video. I hope they suffer repercussions. I hope they get kicked out of school. I hope they have trouble finding jobs later. Seriously. They are vermin. Rant over.

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  24. Jolene said on March 9, 2015 at 6:53 pm

    Is there anything remotely like a generally understood meaning to putting tape over the mouth as part of a protest? Looking at images of Google, I saw a young woman wearing a piece of tape that says, “Silenced.” Makes sense, I guess. But another guy wore a piece of tape that said, “Hear our voices.” Couldn’t we do that better if you took the tape off?

    Seems like the tape-on-mouth maneuver has been used in every imaginable context and seems to have no real meaning other than, “I am protesting something.” Anyone know how this odd behavior got started?

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  25. Deborah said on March 9, 2015 at 6:53 pm

    So many grammatical errors in #23, sorry about that, I was typing in a blind rage.

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  26. devtob said on March 9, 2015 at 9:03 pm

    adrianne’s “former elementary teacher who’s so virulently anti-abortion that he’s accepted all the rhetoric about the Kenyan pretender” describes my late mother, a high school math teacher who spent a good deal of her 30 years of retirement hating on the Democrat baby-killers and was convinced Obama was a Muslim.

    She got her “information” from Fox, talk radio, and the dozens of hyperbolic direct mail solicitations she received every week.

    Four years after her last contribution, wingnut-grifter mail still comes, though it’s down to about a dozen a week now.

    At least your paranoid-deluded former teacher was just a Facebook acquaintance. Believe me, it’s worse when it’s family.

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  27. Sherri said on March 9, 2015 at 9:11 pm

    I think the existence of paranoid deluded right wing acquaintances is the best argument around for not having a Facebook account. I’m really better off not knowing which of my acquaintances watches Fox news. With family, you can’t avoid knowing it, unfortunately.

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  28. Suzanne said on March 9, 2015 at 9:46 pm

    I’ve blocked a few people from my Facebook feed because of their irrational political rants. I am in agreement with Alex that “These are people so heavily invested in their prejudices that no amount of truth is going to change their minds, and you can hardly blame Fox News for catering to them.” Most of them are also so deluded that they are so firmly on the side of all that is good, right, and true, that they can’t fathom that they might be the losers in the chaos that they so gleefully unleash.

    I bet none of them can do a side plank, either.

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  29. MichaelG said on March 9, 2015 at 9:49 pm

    Had lunch with the lovely T today. (my one time wife) I asked her if she had had any email from Hillary Clinton lately. Her response? “I’ll never tell.”

    Just ordered me one of those $17,000 Apple watches. I was going to get a Rolex but the Apple seemed more with it. You know?

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  30. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on March 9, 2015 at 10:49 pm

    Neither will Hill.

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  31. Sue said on March 9, 2015 at 11:31 pm

    Cooz’s link states:
    “A group of 47 Republican senators has written an open letter to Iran’s leaders warning them that any nuclear deal they sign with President Barack Obama’s administration won’t last after Obama leaves office.”
    Soooo, what they’re saying is if we elect Republicans (president and otherwise) in 2016 we can expect to go to war with Iran?
    Someone want to take this and run with it, please?

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