A sunny day with one cloud.

Today was a good day. Walked out to go to my early swim workout and saw a vivid star in the east, which I assume is Venus. Decided I’d try my new iPhone 14 and see if Alex is correct that it can capture starshine:

Affirmative, although a pretty crappy photo overall. Shoulda turned out the back yard light, done a better job of holding still, etc. Well, I was on my way out.

Afterward, a little work, then downriver for something I’ve been meaning to do for a while: Catch a closer look at the under-construction Gordie Howe International Crossing, and whaddaya know, it is coming right along.

It’ll be open by the end of next year, we’re told. It struck me, looking at it, that other than road-building, it’s hard to find an under-construction engineering marvel in my part of the world. But this bridge is 100 percent paid for by Canada. That’s how little they care for the Moroun family, owners of the Ambassador Bridge farther upriver. Much of the work is being done on this side of the river, and the paychecks are signed by Johnny Canuck. Best thing about it? It’ll have a bike lane. I can’t wait to commute to Canada on a bicycle.

Also spotted today: The Detroit-to-Windsor truck ferry.

I’ve seen signs for it, read about it in the papers, but never actually seen it at work. So there you are.

Then I met up with a friend and set off for a photo tour of lovely Delray, but the roads around there are so littered with debris that my bike got a flat 15 minutes in. So it wasn’t a perfect day, but it was an excuse to stop for a taco and Topo Chico at the Mexican cantina nearby. Which we did.

Then pizza for dinner, because why not. I’ll fix the flat tomorrow.

Have a great weekend, all.

Posted at 9:04 pm in Detroit life |
 

60 responses to “A sunny day with one cloud.”

  1. jcburns said on September 14, 2023 at 9:10 pm

    Who is this Johnny Canuck guy and how can I get a check signed by him?

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    • nancy said on September 15, 2023 at 8:20 am

      Google “Canadian equivalent of Uncle Sam” and you’ll find out.

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  2. alex said on September 14, 2023 at 10:46 pm

    The 14 makes the skies look simply heavenly, although it didn’t do justice to the Starlink satellite the one time I’ve seen it so far.

    Glad there will be an alternative to the Maroun bridge. I actually preferred it to Port Huron on my last trip to Canada (I entered through Port Huron and returned through the Ambassador) but I suspect having a second bridge in close proximity to the Ambassador should halve the traffic and the insufferable wait times.

    Well, I announced my retirement earlier this week and got a lot of good feedback from my colleagues. I did a blanket e-mail to the whole firm rather than just to management and HR and I was magnanimous and managed to conceal my utter contempt for what the place has become. I gave a month and a half’s notice. And I am feeling better than I have in years.

    Everyone I know who has retired at 62 says it’s the best decision they ever made and that the only people who would continue beyond that either don’t have any savings or are more married to their jobs than they are to their spouses. As a worker who has found work increasingly thankless rather than rewarding, this choice was a no-brainer.

    People ask what I’m going to do with my time. For years I haven’t had enough of it, so cutting out the ten or so hours a work day consumes (in addition to the time spent tending to work clothes and other appurtenances) doesn’t seem like anything other than the best present I’ve ever given myself. What I’m hoping to do is devote more time to physical activity so that I can, hopefully, go off insulin and one or two of my three blood pressure meds and possibly some of the other of the dozen meds I have to take. It should be a great relief because I’m deconditioned as hell from being in a sedentary job and perpetually stressed not only by Trumpism but from being pissed all the time at having too many unreasonable and stupid people in my orbit.

    But I didn’t share any of that in my retirement announcement. I’m so grateful to be able to vent it all here.

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  3. LAMary said on September 14, 2023 at 11:24 pm

    If the ex hadn’t reamed me financially I’d be retired. I’m liking the American Indian Alaskan Native job, though. Went to a meeting three weeks ago at the headquarters and they said they needed someone to do the newsletter and create flyers. I raised my hand. I am now getting praised for my work. Woo hoo. It’s not like working remotely for some bloated insurance company that reminds you on the regular that you’re a temp. Or working for the aforementioned QTC which is just a nasty place. Just ugly. Getting praised for my native plant garden opening day party flyer, nice photos of agaves, nice font, polite but somewhat clever wording…gimme more of that.

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  4. Mark P said on September 15, 2023 at 1:52 am

    Alex, I’m happy for you. I hope you find retirement to be everything you hope it will be, and more.

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  5. Dexter Friend said on September 15, 2023 at 3:52 am

    I wanted to quit my last job the day I started, but I had to wait 30 years and a month. Now I have been retired 20 years. My attempts to find a retirement job all died on the vine, or en utero… I never reported to any of the places for my interviews.
    Alex, you and your husband go places, work on your property, travel some, so you will be like almost all of us, meaning you will be amazed how you ever found time to go to work, and you’ll never miss the old junkyard , ever.
    Confession: it was usually customary on a person’s last day that the boss would send someone to relieve the retiree from work so s/he could say goodbye to everyone and share the retirement cake at break time.
    Not me…I had to bust my ass even to the point of working 15 minutes over to make sure I left the area in shape. My retirement cake was delivered to another shift and eaten by those guys. The customary envelope of $1 bills that union stewards collected for all retiring workers was locked up in the union room and I had to screw around finding the guy with the key…but still…when I passed the security guard shack, surprisingly, through my disgust at my last day there ever, a tear welled up in one eye and I choked it back. It was a tear of joy? I was just so glad to leave that goddam place for-fucking-ever.
    The following from Google:
    Every iPhone 14 Model Compared: the Biggest Differences
    The iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus are Apple’s “budget” options, while the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max are “premium” phones with additional features. The biggest differences between the four iPhone 14 models are their cameras and the “Dynamic Island” included in the two Pro models.
    I have the iPhone 14. Do these other models have better cameras? My phone will not capture star shine.

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  6. ROGirl said on September 15, 2023 at 4:58 am

    I’ve been feeling like walking away from my job recently, my 67th birthday is less than a month away, but I’m not ready to give up the paycheck. It’s a decent place to work for me, despite the Christian cult that the owner believes in and promotes.

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  7. David C said on September 15, 2023 at 5:55 am

    I plan to work until I’m 70. I like what I do and I’m treated well. It’s mostly because my wife wasn’t made for the world of work (Autism spectrum disorder) so we’ve been single income for most of our marriage. It’s been a struggle financially at times and since she’ll likely outlive me I need to make sure we have enough for her to survive alone.

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  8. alex said on September 15, 2023 at 7:37 am

    Dex, it’s the Pro models that have the good cameras. I see Apple just launched a 15 but the reviews say that pretty much nothing has changed but the charging cord. I would probably still be using my 11 except that I dropped it when I had it out of its case and cracked the entire backside of it. And it didn’t fall far, just off the end of a sofa. Ceramic tile floor, meet ceramic-cladded phone.

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  9. Deborah said on September 15, 2023 at 8:20 am

    On October 6th it will be 11 years since I retired, I don’t regret leaving the work world when I did for even one second. I was 62 when I left, I’ll be 73 in a few weeks. Life is great.

    I leave for Chicago tomorrow. It’s been an odd summer in New Mexico, I didn’t accomplish nearly as much as I wanted to mainly because of our month long house/pet sit in Abiquiu.

    I went back to the cabin on Sunday to pick up some stuff I didn’t want to leave there during the fall while we’re away. I was only there for a few minutes because I had a memorial to go to for a friend who died about a month ago. The memorial was moving, lots of people spoke and so did I, I told a brief story of a simple act of kindness I observed our friend doing. He was a good guy.

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  10. nancy said on September 15, 2023 at 8:48 am

    Alex, congratulations. I doubt you’ll regret it.

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  11. Dorothy said on September 15, 2023 at 9:04 am

    Alex my husband and I were both 66 this year. I’ve been retired for 20 months now but he’s retiring on 2/1/24. We have very good savings but he is a 3X cancer survivor, and I think he fears that he’s going to face a serious illness that could really impact our savings, so he’s kept working. He’s making really good money right now. He is ready to retire but after we talked to Social Security, the best scenario is for him to draw on SS as of Feb of 2025. I’m going to apply soon, too.

    Letting you know all this because your comment @2 above about people who keep working past 62 is not entirely accurate. Mike is not married to his job. He actually likes what he does for a living. But he commutes 3 hours a day – it’s taking a toll. And he’s very much looking forward to retirement. There’s a room in the basement for him to design and build a model train layout, and he’s going to expand his beekeeping hobby if he can find somewhere to sell more of it. We harvested honey twice this summer and currently have about 30 unsold bottles. And our grandkids are just a short walk away from our house, so we plan to see them as often as they’ll tolerate us.

    Also congratulations! You’re going to love being retired.

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  12. Julie Robinson said on September 15, 2023 at 9:28 am

    Congratulations, Alex! It sounds like you’re more than ready.

    D wore suits all his working life but only once in the 2+ years since he retired, when our niece was married. Yesterday he went to pull it out to be cleaned ahead of our son’s wedding–no suit! We’ve scoured the house and can only think it must have been left behind in New Orleans. How ironic to have to buy a suit after retirement, but there is a ceremony here and a reception in Arizona, and by the time you rent a suit twice, you might as well buy it.

    So Alex, hang on to a suit.

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  13. Mark P said on September 15, 2023 at 9:54 am

    I wasn’t saving much before I got married at 50, but then started packing away as much as I could. We’re ok now, but I worry about what will happen when my wife’s dementia progresses to the point that she needs constant care.

    I liked my coworkers and I kind of liked my work, but I had a crisis around 1995 and quit my full time job. I came back as a consultant, and that saved my sanity. I worked about another 15 years. At the end of that I was starting to hate the job. My retirement was just telling my boss I wouldn’t be coming in after a certain date. There was no luncheon. No one even said, “Bye.” But who cares. After I retired, I said I have finally found the job I was meant for.

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  14. jcburns said on September 15, 2023 at 10:28 am

    Congratulations Alex. I respectfully DISagree with you on the differences between an iPhone Pro 14 and an iPhone Pro 15. There are lotsa changes! The damn thing is titanium! Lighter! The Max has a 120mm lens! The glass surfaces are better! The camera software, whoo boy, way way better.

    Can you tell I just ordered our new ones (replacing 11 Pros)?

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  15. Icarus said on September 15, 2023 at 10:59 am

    I suppose I am Involuntarily Retired at 54. Here in the backwaters of Mississippi, there are no law firms in Memphis that use the software I am an SME of. Pivoting isn’t as easy as it sounds.

    Most law firms require even their remote workers to be in a state where they have an office for tax compliance. The consulting firms don’t want me because I have too much Corporate America experience i.e. I know how to set boundaries they would like to exploit with someone a tad younger.

    I’m perfect on paper but I keep blowing interviews. So no new iPhone or iPad for me.

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  16. Heather said on September 15, 2023 at 11:34 am

    Alex, congratulations! It sounds like you have a good plan for enjoying life to the fullest.

    A friend of mine retired last year–she is about my age, 53. But she was a HR exec for many years and I am a writer, so…I hope I can retire someday. Anyway she’s having a great time traveling and volunteering. I’m very jealous.

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  17. Scout said on September 15, 2023 at 1:41 pm

    Big Congrats, alex. I’m positive you will not regret this decision. You’ve been clearly stressed and unhappy at that job for years.

    My retirement date is 4/1/24 when I will be 66.6 and eligible for full SS. I have been unofficially semi-retired since March of 2020 when I was able to work from home during Covid. I have not had 40 hours of work for at least 5 years but my saint of a boss insists on keeping me salaried. Once Covid quarantine ended, I started working 2 days in the office and 3 at home, but those home days are mostly checking emails and putting out occasional fires, and I manage to work out at my Medicare paid for gyms those days as well. After 4/1/24 I will continue to help my boss out a day or two a week because he has been so generous to me, and because at 71 he is taking fewer projects and slowing phasing out of business anyway, so no point in getting someone new in. So I’m ride or die with him.

    My wife has been retired for almost 6 years and she is READY for me to be too. Travel is definitely in the cards.

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  18. Snarkworth said on September 15, 2023 at 4:16 pm

    “My retirement cake was delivered to another shift and eaten by those guys.”

    Wow. When it comes to a bad last day, that takes the cake.

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  19. Sherri said on September 15, 2023 at 4:24 pm

    My husband isn’t ready to retire yet, even though he’s turning 65 in December and we don’t need him to continue to work financially. He is going to slow down some, though. Starting next week, he’s transitioning to a role where he won’t have to run a large team anymore, because he was tired of spending all his time in meetings and handling people problems. He’s in a good place where he likes his org and they like him; if they didn’t, they would have laid him off earlier this year in the big layoffs. We know lots of people roughly his age who were hit by the layoffs.

    Nobody’s paying me to do anything, but two of my major roles will be winding down next year, and I’m ready to take a break before I figure out what’s next.

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  20. Jeff Gill said on September 15, 2023 at 6:09 pm

    Congrats, Alex. I’m trying to figure out how to have some health coverage to 67, five years off yet, but my work situation is too complex to explain anyhow.

    Y’all might enjoy listening to our host get called a neo-Marxist on The Week That Was (I think it was said with love):

    https://www.facebook.com/707349017/posts/pfbid0NJpm8AsMCiu59UpTjtc2rL5w3RxpGo1qZqFVXpdc5xfsntTYDY7ggN5Pc9VsfTSyl/?mibextid=cr9u03

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  21. kayak woman said on September 15, 2023 at 6:49 pm

    I will be 70 on my next birthday and I am still working at the job I fell into when I was 53 or so. It’s a really sweet job (and totally remote since you-know-when so I can work from our cabin or wherever) and I’ll keep on until… I decide to retire or they lay me off (it’s an at will company and I’ve somehow survived a LOT of layoffs). But I’ve had a different “career” trajectory than a lot of people. “Childhood” low paid tech job, then a number of years of SAHM (doing interesting and intense volunteer work the whole time). I wasn’t sure I would ever have paid work again but I was taking community college classes and got an internship (online banking) and they hired me full time and here I am. Who knew? Cheers to those who are retired or are planning to retire soon.

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  22. Deborah said on September 15, 2023 at 8:02 pm

    Whoa, have you guys seen the videos of Lauren Boebert in the theater in Denver watching the Beetlejuice musical in Denver. She’s falling out of her dress, her companion is enjoying her breasts and she’s vaping, among other things. She gets kicked out by ushers for causing a disturbance and then she plays the “do you know who I am” card before using the middle finger salute to the ushers as she leaves. And this woman is a Republican congresswoman.

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  23. susan said on September 15, 2023 at 8:43 pm

    …and you can’t shoot her.

    Trae says something about TrashBoebert

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  24. Suzanne said on September 15, 2023 at 10:37 pm

    Congratulations Alex! You will love retirement. It’s great to get up in the morning and putter around until you feel like doing something. I planned on working longer, but good old cancer stopped that plan and I really don’t mind. Do we need the money I would have earned? Yeah, probably, but we will manage.

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  25. FDChief said on September 15, 2023 at 11:03 pm

    The part of the Boebert vape-n-grope story that keeps bugging me is that they were in orchestra seats of a big Broadway musical. That’s gotta be hundreds, possibly even a thousand dollars a seat.

    And instead of watching the show, you’re toking and groping? Madudes, that’s what “The Meg” is for! Or wait until you’re in the Uber! How stupid are you?

    I’ve never had a great deal of respect for this woman’s sense. But this? Wow.

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  26. Sherri said on September 16, 2023 at 12:44 am

    It’s a touring Broadway show in a Denver, so it was probably more like $150/ticket, not thousands, but still, it’s not an outdoor rock concert. She’s not dressed like it’s an outdoor rock concert, why is she acting like it’s an outdoor rock concert?

    Probably, someone gave her the tickets. I doubt she shelled out the bucks for them.

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  27. FDChief said on September 16, 2023 at 1:09 am

    Sherri: we saw “Hadestown” in Portland this winter. Orchestra side-aisle seats ran upwards of $200. Center aisles started at $350. First balcony $500. Boxes $750 or more.

    Resale orchestra tickets at Seatgeek after the shows sold out we’re going as high as $800 or more.

    Even on the road, Broadway is crazy spendy. Too spendy to waste feeling up your date, anyway. Unless you’re a QANut gun-humper, apparently…

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  28. LAMary said on September 16, 2023 at 10:48 am

    In other trashy republican news, Bristol Palin has had nine cosmetic surgeries and is or was on “Teen Mom.” She also regrets having her eyebrows microbladed. I wondered about her feelings about her eyebrows. Now we know.

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  29. LAMary said on September 16, 2023 at 10:53 am

    http://energylogicacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloud.jpg

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  30. Jeff Borden said on September 16, 2023 at 12:56 pm

    I love Bobo’s explanation that her “high profile” divorce from her skeevy husband and her presence in “a new environment” (whatever that means) not only caused her to act like an asshole, but also to forget that she was vaping. People like Bobo always expect to be forgiven for their errors but they rarely extend the courtesy to others.

    ‘Murica has a stupid problem and it’s only getting worse.

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  31. Sherri said on September 16, 2023 at 1:00 pm

    FDChief, we saw Hadestown in Seattle last summer, seats on the main floor which are the most expensive at the Paramount, and I paid $345 for 3 seats with all the Ticketmaster fees. I went to the Buell theater site in Denver, and there are still seats available for Beetlejuice, most expensive being $155. I looked ahead for future touring shows like Tina, and seats were cheaper than that for better seats.

    Right now, I could get tickets for next Friday night on Broadway for Six the Musical, aisle seats on the main floor near the stage, for $269/each, from the official ticket seller. I don’t know what was going on in Portland last winter, but thousands for a touring Broadway production is pretty unusual. The first time Hamilton came to Seattle, you did have to shell out thousands, but that was because you had to buy a subscription to get Hamilton.

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  32. Deborah said on September 16, 2023 at 1:34 pm

    I wonder how Boebert is going to continue the rest of her term after such an embarrassing situation, but it probably doesn’t faze her, judging from her past. Her staff probably wrote her “apology”, I can’t imagine working for her.

    I’m in the jaws of hell, in other words at the airport waiting for my flight to Chicago. Why do airports have to be so unpleasant? This one in Albuquerque is being renovated, it’s actually one of the nicer airports I’ve been through.

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  33. David C said on September 16, 2023 at 2:22 pm

    Funny she forgot until they had the video. She didn’t mention if she forgot the handy she gave her boy-toy.

    “People hope that if they scream loudly enough about “values” then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.”

    Marshall McLuhan

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  34. tajalli said on September 16, 2023 at 2:24 pm

    Maybe Boebert’s staff use an AI to write the apologies.

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  35. Julie Robinson said on September 16, 2023 at 3:00 pm

    Boebert “didn’t know” she wasn’t supposed to record the show with her phone. Every theatre announces this and prints it in the Playbill, not that I think she reads. She wasn’t vaping, it was smoke from the stage. She was singing loudly; also frowned on unless directed by those on stage. For theatre peeple all this is no different than if she came into church with this behavior, because theatre=church. The hypocrisy is stunning, but no longer unexpected.

    Deborah, hope you’re home by now. Our Sarah had a Very Bad Experience on Frontier and ended up taking two days to get home from Seattle. It was the usual flight delay/unhelpful/understaffed airline shite.

    I don’t recommend flying Frontier but unfortunately she talked us into some ultra cheap ticket deals and we have two trips where that’s our airline. They’ve changed their flight times two or three times per flight and the new times are awful. Then they eliminated a bunch of flights so there were no good options for rebooking. I had to change hotels and car rentals and it’s confusing just keeping up with it all. Never again, no matter how good the price.

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  36. Deborah said on September 16, 2023 at 6:14 pm

    I’m in Chicago now, uneventful flight thank goodness. When we fly in the US we almost always fly Southwest, haven’t had too many problems over the years. I don’t have to fly again until we go back to NM in December. Then after that in January we fly to LA to see my husband’s granddaughter, then to San Francisco for a few days and then to Tokyo, that last flight will be on American Airlines I think.

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  37. LAMary said on September 16, 2023 at 6:29 pm

    If she was vaping something that’s illegal she could get the Hunter Biden treatment. She’s got lots of guns. She must have lied on her license application. I mean, I know she’s not the sort of person who would smoke weed. Ever. But if her skeevy divorce has her confused and upset as well as being in a new environment (Denver) she may have accidentally vaped something other than tobacco.
    Letting that guy mess with her tits in the theatre was classy.

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  38. Deborah said on September 16, 2023 at 9:18 pm

    Norms don’t make any difference to people like Boebert and Trump. Those traditions and proper behaviors don’t apply to them, they’re above that, don’t ya know.

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  39. Mark P said on September 16, 2023 at 9:59 pm

    Norms don’t matter to Trump because he is a psychopath, or at least on the psychopathic spectrum. I don’t know about Boebert. She’s probably just trash. Or, it may be that from the depths of her personality she aspires to be trash.

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  40. Deborah said on September 17, 2023 at 11:25 am

    I read somewhere that Hunter Biden owned that gun for only 17 days that he bought while addicted to drugs. If I had to guess, I would say that he probably bought the gun to kill himself as he was down in the pits of addiction. Anyway, he got indicted as we all know now. If he broke the law he should pay the price but it’s certainly ironic that the right wing is making such a stink about gun ownership for once.

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  41. Mark P said on September 17, 2023 at 12:09 pm

    I have heard or read from several former prosecutors that Hunter Biden’s “crimes” would never have resulted in the current indictments or any jail time at all if he were not the president’s son.

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  42. LAMary said on September 17, 2023 at 12:25 pm

    Hunter had the gun for 11 days. Boebert on the other hand made a big deal about carrying her Glock with her to her first day in Congress.

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  43. alex said on September 17, 2023 at 4:10 pm

    I only just now found out that the name of Commiskey Park has been defiled not just once but twice. And that it’s now known as Guaranteed Rate Field, which sounds about as low-rent as it gets.

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  44. LAMary said on September 17, 2023 at 7:44 pm

    We have Crypto Arena here. That’s pretty low rent. It was Staples Center previously.

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  45. tajalli said on September 17, 2023 at 8:04 pm

    The (former) Oakland Coliseum has been renamed so many times, same with the SF Coliseum, that the highway signage uses only “The Coliseum” or “Coliseum Way”. I can’t remember whatever the current “name” is and simply refer to them as the Oakland or SF Coliseum or the Giants Stadium – who is supposed to have the patience for these changing corporate ego brand names.

    Alex, maybe people should start naming their kids Guaranteed Rate or Sucha Deal.

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  46. Jeff Gill said on September 17, 2023 at 10:10 pm

    It’s not exactly an excuse to say I’m heartbroken for the fact that Hunter’s brother’s widow threw his gun into a dumpster, not a wise move but an understandable one, which then triggered the sequence of events we’re still experiencing together. I’m sure she’s had plenty of time since to regret seeking solace in the familiar if alien arms of her husband’s confused and disoriented brother.

    Just so damn sad. For all of them. And Joe? Quit retelling that story. Except I know all too well you can’t.

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  47. basset said on September 17, 2023 at 11:25 pm

    All, or at least most, of us know the Grateful Dead “Steal Your Face” symbol, don’t we? The skull from above with the brain pan full of flowers or Indy 500 checkered flags or whatever? Saw one today in a t-shirt shop in Georgia… on a tie-dyed shirt, filled with an Atlanta Braves logo and labeled “Steal Your Base.”

    Well, I liked it anyway. Not $36 worth, though.

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  48. ROGirl said on September 18, 2023 at 5:25 am

    The open air music venue Pine Knob has been around since the 1960s. For a few years the name was changed to DTE Energy Music Tneatre, but within the past year or so it was changed back to Pine Knob. I never called it anything but Pine Knob.

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  49. Dexter Friend said on September 18, 2023 at 7:18 am

    Alex, the old ballpark, Comiskey Park, was replaced in 1991 and dubbed “New Comiskey”, then US Cellular Field, then GRF. I hated the new place and have only been there about 6 times.
    I turn 74 today and reflect on the fun we had at Pine Knob in the 70s. Gordon Lightfoot, CSN, and Crosby-Nash too. David Lindley’s slide fiddle still echoes in my head.
    The Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum was the name when I went there frequently for A’s games as Charlie Finley let uniformed military people in for free, every game. Now the professional teams make a BIG DEAL over military appreciation by letting in one veteran in for free once a year. Yeah, big fucking deal. Charlie Finley was hated by players and owners and others, but the man really appreciated guys like me living on like $125/month by letting us into his ballpark.

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  50. alex said on September 18, 2023 at 7:39 am

    I went to games in the new Commiskey maybe twice back when it was new. I remember the place feeling like being inside a giant teacup. I got to party in a box seat one of those times on a business-related outing and I remember it being quite lavish and also distracting from the game. Being a northsider I was partial to the Cubs and Wrigley and games were a whole lot more fun there.

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  51. Deborah said on September 18, 2023 at 11:11 am

    The St. Louis stadium (which my husband designed back in the 90s) changed to the TWA dome at some point and they painted giant TWA letters on the roof of the dome so that planes flying over would see them. Of course TWA is long gone and that stadium went through quite a few names since. And St. Louis hasn’t had a football team in ages. My husband said back then that he was more interested in designing the stadium for Madonna, not sports.

    Baseball in St. Louis of course is another story with a new stadium since Busch Stadium, same location though. I have no idea what that stadium is called now?

    I’ve only been to Wrigley once and never went to Comisky or whatever it’s called.

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  52. Jeff Borden said on September 18, 2023 at 11:55 am

    Did it make any sense at all for the new host of “Meet the Press” to begin her tenure with a prerecorded interview with tRump? I’ve ignored “MTP” for years because host Chuck Todd was such a toady to power and a disciple of “both sides do it.” And then this…interviewing a fucking psychopath and letting most of his lies go unchallenged. Well done NBC and Kristen Welker. I was naive to think it would be any different.

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  53. Mark P said on September 18, 2023 at 12:08 pm

    Welker called him “Mr. President.” I’m sure that gave him a thrill.

    NBC has a history of atrocious journalism. She’s just living up to their reputation.

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  54. Sherri said on September 18, 2023 at 1:11 pm

    I feel no nostalgia for the name Comiskey. Charles Comiskey was the owner of the White Sox, and was notorious for treating his players badly. He underpaid his players, and that was likely a factor in the Black Sox scandal, not that that kept him out of the Hall of Fame.

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  55. Jeff Borden said on September 18, 2023 at 1:12 pm

    The only time I want to see that blob in a golf shirt interviewed is after he’s been given a shot of sodium pentathol.

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  56. Dave said on September 18, 2023 at 2:43 pm

    Julie Robinson, your daughter’s efforts have caught the attention of several. I see her story at the Crooks and Liars website.

    https://crooksandliars.com/2023/09/orlando-church-offers-ap-african-american

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  57. Julie Robinson said on September 18, 2023 at 3:06 pm

    That’s cool, Dave. Almost 900 are signed up and they’ve closed registration now. I’m sure a lot of people will drop off, but they really thought it would be 30, so they are making some changes on the fly. It’s a little hard to have a discussion group with that many people.

    We were all Cubs fans, but a few times Dad got some free Sox tickets, and my main memory is the little boys in the parking lot with big smiles. Watch your car for you, mister? And you better pay up, unless you wanted your tires slashed.

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  58. Jeff Gill said on September 18, 2023 at 5:18 pm

    A nice story from WOSU on the World Heritage List inscription now scheduled for tomorrow (Tuesday morning) at the UNESCO World Heritage Committee meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

    https://news.wosu.org/arts-culture/2023-09-18/hopewell-earthworks-including-2-newark-sites-poised-to-become-ohios-first-world-heritage-site

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  59. Sherri said on September 18, 2023 at 6:47 pm

    I suppose there are some cops at major city police forces who aren’t bastards, but it’s hard to find them in Seattle. Our story begins when an officer responds to a possible OD call at night at high speed (75 mph in a 25 mph zone), not with full lights and siren, but the occasional blip of the siren. It’s unclear why the possible OD call needed a police response to begin with; the 911 call was placed by the person who thought they’d OD’ed, looking for medical help.

    Anyway, our speeding cop hits and kills a pedestrian. That’s bad, and prompts lots of questions about the appropriateness of the response. But wait! It gets worse!

    The vice president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild responds to the scene where the pedestrian is killed, and reports to the president of the SPOG about what happened. Only, he forgets that his bodycam is on, so we get to hear him telling the SPOG president that is was just a regular person who was killed, laughing about it, saying “just write a check”, saying her life “was of limited value”, before he remembers his bodycam is on and shuts it off.

    https://www.thestranger.com/cops/2023/09/14/79166027/explaining-a-seattle-cops-bloated-sense-of-self-worth

    Still trying to figure out exactly what it is that cops do to promote public safety.

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